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PLAYING SQUARE 
WITH TOMORROW 



by FRED EASTMAN 

Author of Unfinished Business 



Published jointly by 

COUNCIL OF WOMEN FOR HOME MISSIONS 

AND 

MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT 

New York 






50 



COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY THE 

COUNCIL OF WOMEN FOR HOME MISSIONS 

AND 

MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT OF THE 

UNITED STATES AND CANADA 



AUG 15192! 

©CU622414 



To My Mother and Father 

WHO HAVE WALKED THE PATH OF SERVICE 
TOGETHER FOR NEARLY FIFTY YEARS, THIS 
LITTLE BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 



PREFACE 

To stand with an ambitious young American at 
the cross-roads of Self-interest and Service — 
To consider both roads — 
To point the way to the road of Service — 
To set forth in simple everyday language the rea- 
sonable faith that is the inspiration and the 
comfort of the traveler — 
To unmask the opposition — 
To discover the footsteps of the Great Captain — 
To show some of the gigantic tasks that must be 
completed if America is to fulfil her mission 
among the nations— 
To tell the stories of others who have already 

chosen the road of Service — 
To help to an understanding of the necessity of 
playing square with tomorrow — 

Such is the purpose of this book. 
The author is deeply indebted to Dr. Miles B. 
Fisher, Mrs. John S. Allen and Miss E. Jessie 
Ogg, the committee in charge of the publication of 
the book, for reading the manuscript and for con- 
structive criticism. His gratitude is also due to 
his wife for constant encouragement and unfailing 
cheerfulness. 

F. E. 
New York City 
April, 1921 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I Young America at the Crossroads 1 

II The Way of the Crowd 29 

III Where Does Service Begin 45 

IV Needs of Town and Country Communi- 

ties 73 

V Other Unfinished Tasks 97 

VI The Life of Service 127 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

A Student Conference Frontispiece 

Service Begins at Home 50 

A Throng of New Americans 66 

Old-time and Modern Rural Churches 82 

A Lonely Cabin in the Southern Mountains 98 

An Alaskan Guide, Philosopher, and Friend 114 

Mexican Laborers 122 

Migrant Vegetable Pickers 130 



PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 



CHAPTEK ONE 

Young America at the Crossroads 

Some time ago a young girl who had been 
having considerable success as a writer was stop- 
ping at the house of her uncle, a man of broad 
culture and learning. In the course of her visit, 
the young woman spoke much of the Bohemian 
life she had been living and of how much livelier 
it was than the old-fashioned home life of her 
forefathers. She had joined a group of young 
artists and authors who seemed to be agreed that 
upon our generation a great light had burst. They 
were making progress, she said, in overthrowing 
the traditions of the past. They saw little value 
in the art or the writing of yesterday. 

The uncle listened with what patience he could 
muster. Then the girl went on to declaim on the 
merits of certain modern writers who admittedly 
have great powers of expression, but, in the 
opinion of the uncle, precious little to express. 
Finally, he spoke his mind. 

"My dear niece," he said, "you don't know 
anything. You don't read. You don't think." 

"Why," exclaimed the girl, "I am one of the 
best-read young persons I know. I have read 



2 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

De Maupassant complete. I have read everything 
that Wells and Galsworthy and Ibanez have 
written. ' ' 

"All very good, but I still maintain, " said her 
uncle, "that you don't know anything, that you 
don't think, and that you don't read. Literature 
is a great tree deep-rooted in past centuries. The 
twigs are the products of our own time. Some of 
them will become permanent branches, others will 
soon die and fall. You have been studying a few 
of these twigs, and you think you know the whole 
tree, but you don't. You must study the roots 
and the trunk and the branches before you know 
the tree. What do you know about the writings 
of the men who have lived before this genera- 
tion? Here," he said, taking a book from his 
library, "is one of the roots. It is a story called 
Prometheus Bound. It is the story of a struggle 
between a god and a man. It shows the measure- 
less power of Jove to inflict torment and torture 
upon a human being, and it shows the equally 
measureless power of that human being to stand 
in the face of the god and resist the torture. 
There is so much truth in this story that it has 
come down through more than two thousand 
years. Have you read it?" 

"No," said the girl, "I haven't read it. I'll 
try to read it some day." 

But her uncle was not to be put off. He urged 



YOUNG AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS 3 

her to read the book that night and to compare 
it with the products of some of the other crafts- 
men whose work she valued. 

The girl took the book to her room, and she 
read it through before she slept. The next morn- 
ing she met her uncle at the breakfast table. 
There were tears in her eyes. 

"You were right," she said, "it is a great 
book. I wish it could be read by every young 
American, especially by every college student who 
is trying to make up his mind what he is going 
to do and be." 

The trend of things in the colleges. This young 
writer's experience is not unique. The trend of 
these days is toward the contemporary, the mate- 
rial, and the superficial. President Nicholas 
Murray Butler of Columbia, in his last annual re- 
port, says : 

"The ruling passion is not to know and to un- 
derstand but to get ahead, to overturn something, 
to apply in ways that bring material advantage 
some bit of information or some acquired skill. 
Both school and college have in large part taken 
their minds off the true business of education, 
which is to prepare youth to live, and have fixed 
them upon something which is very subordinate ; 
namely, how to prepare youth to make a living." 

Edward S. Martin, an outstanding American 
essayist, sums it up this way : 



4 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

"In the colleges and in the world outside the 
colleges two conceptions of life are struggling in 
conflict. One is that the aim of life is to acquire 
and apply understanding. The other is that the 
aim. is to acquire and apply money. One is that 
the aim of life is the formation of character. The 
other is that the aim of life is ' success.' The col- 
leges ought to be clearly and conspicuously on the 
side of character and understanding. ' ? 

It is the task of the younger generation. Dr. 
Butler and Mr. Martin are doubtless right. The 
only question is, Who is going to put the colleges 
and the world clearly and conspicuously on the 
side of character and understanding! Who will 
lead the colleges and the world to a higher and a 
better state of life? This book is written in the 
conviction that it is the task of the younger gen- 
eration. It is written to the young men and 
women of college age who are now trying to make 
up their minds what they are going to do and what 
they are going to be. 

The choice is between a life of self-interest and 
a life of service. It is the same choice that has 
confronted young men and young women of every 
new generation. But there never was a time when 
it was more important that the choice should be 
right and the decision sure. For altogether too 
many people in the past have chosen the life of 
self-interest, and as a result the world was never 
more in need of young men and young women who 



YOUNG AMEBICA AT THE CROSSROADS 5 

have the courage and the faith to choose the path 
of service. Consider what self-interest has 
brought upon us. 

The state of the world. A crime wave has been 
sweeping over America and Europe. Worse yet, 
there is fearful suffering throughout Central 
Europe, the Near East, Eussia, and China. There 
are 3,500,000 children starving in Europe. Back 
of those figures lies a war in which most of the 
so-called civilized peoples of the world tore at 
each others ' throats for four years, killing 7,781,- 
806 men and wounding 18,681,257 more. The sign- 
ing of peace in Paris did not end fighting in 
Eussia, Turkey, Eoumania, Poland, Hungary, Ar- 
menia, and Persia. Civil war is sweeping over 
parts of Central and South America, Africa, and 
the Orient. And Ireland is bursting into flame. 

The world's children. While their fathers are 
warring and their mothers working in factories, 
what is happening to the children? Many are 
already dead, others are starving, and millions 
are being neglected, left to grow up without knowl- 
edge of God or of the things in this world that are 
true and beautiful and good. In practically every 
country at war juvenile delinquency has increased 
appallingly. In England during the war, accord- 
ing to Mr. Cecil Leeson, juvenile offenses in- 
creased 34 per cent and juvenile lawlessness 
spread through the country like a plague. This 



« PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

picture given in the Russkiia Viedomosti has its 
counter-part in the other nations: "Crowds of 
children from nine to fifteen years of age are 
found in the streets at midnight in front of the 
night tea-houses. . . . Boys are soon drawn into 
the life of these night tea-houses. ... In many 
of the lodging houses whisky is sold, and many 
are filled with prostitutes. . . . The above con- 
veys only an idea of the horrible conditions under 
which the working children in Moscow have to live 
at present." 

The world stands in need of salvation. It is an 
old and hackneyed phrase, but there can be no 
doubt of the need. Salvation from what? From 
war, from hatred, from the power of those who 
put the advance of their own nation above the wel- 
fare of humanity, who seek the advancement of 
their own class before the Kingdom of God and its 
righteousness. "We are not so proud of living in 
the twentieth century as we were a few years ago. 

Now the world as it is, with all its suffering and 
chaos, with all its muddle and distress, seems to 
be looking to America to save it. Sir Philip Gibbs, 
the great English war correspondent, after a visit 
in this country last year, wrote : 

"The destiny of the American people is now 
marked out for the great mission of leading the 

world to a new phase of civilization They 

cannot escape from that power even though they 



YOUNG AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS 7 

shrink from its responsibility. By their action 
they may plunge the world into strife again or 
settle its peace. They may kill or cure. They may 
be reconcilers or destroyers. It is a terrific power 
for any people to hold. If I were a citizen of the 
United States, I should be afraid — afraid lest my 
country should by passion or by ignorance take 
the wrong way." 1 

Sir Philip is certainly right. If America chooses 
the wrong road — the road of self-interest — she will 
lead the nations of the world, but it will be to their 
damnation, through militarism, imperialism, and 
greed. 

The state of America, The followers of the 
gospel of self-interest have been as busy here as 
across the water, and, as a result, America also 
stands in need of being saved. From what? From 
the bitterness that is reaching white heat in the 
struggle between capital and labor. At a meeting 
of landlords in New York a few months ago, a pro- 
posal that they limit their profits to 20 per cent 
was howled down. "We want all we can get!" 
cried one landlord who seemed to voice the senti- 
ment of the crowd. And a labor leader addressing 
his organization exhorted them to "fix in their 
minds the beautiful thought of more." 

We need to be saved from all such selfishness, 
from the suspicion and hatred between classes 
that is forcing men apart instead of bringing them 

1 People of Destiny. By Philip Gibbs. Harper and Brothers. 



8 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

together. We need to be saved from becoming a 
great conglomeration of warring races and par- 
ties. We need to be saved from the politicians 
who prate about our "splendid isolation" and 
who try to persuade us to play the part of the 
Pharisee among the stricken peoples of the earth. 
The state of morality. But of all the issues 
that have arisen in this country during the past 
few years there has been none more vital to the 
future of the human beings who live in this nation 
than the moral relationships among young people. 
By moral relationships is meant primarily rela- 
tionships between the sexes. These relationships 
are important not only to the young people them- 
selves, — and their happiness and usefulness may 
be irretrievably affected, — but to this nation and 
to the world. There is a consensus of opinion 
among those who are closest to the facts that there 
is at present a sag in social morality that is alarm- 
ing. Here are a few indications of it gathered 
in one roundabout trip from New York to Mis- 
souri last summer. Leaving New York I bought 
a leading New York newspaper. On the front 
page President Hibben's baccalaureate sermon 
at Princeton was featured. Now baccalaureate 
sermons are honorable affairs but they are 
seldom considered news, yet the papers and maga- 
zines have quoted and commented upon this par- 
ticular sermon at length : 



YOUNG AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS 9 

"We are weakly allowing ourselves to be ruled 
by the Goddess of Folly, slaves in her domain to 
the fashion of the hour. The modern dress, the 
modern dance, the modern music, and modern 
manners are symptoms that indicate that some- 
how in this age we have lost our bearings, and 
that old values of life, once so highly prized, have 
been forgotten. 

' ' There is the danger of a lessening if not a loss 
of the old-time reverence for womanhood. There 
is no longer an aura of mystery about the young 
woman today, a mystery at once her defense and 
her glory, and whenever in the history of the race 
this divine prerogative of womanhood is lightly 
regarded or recklessly scorned, it has always 
proved a symptom of decadence far-reaching and 
disastrous. Every age of moral and spiritual 
progress in the history of any people has always 
been an age of chivalry, in which womanhood has 
not only been respected but revered.' ' 

Having read this sermon on the train, I stopped 
at a city in the Middle West. On the first page 
of one of its local newspapers was a letter from a 
mother urging upon other mothers of high school 
students the following : 

1. An epidemic of puppy love seems to be im- 
minent among students. 

2. Ordinarily such an epidemic would not be re- 
garded as more than a passing affair. 

3. But this year, owing to the lack of restraint 
and the breaking down of conventions that usually 
safeguard the reverence for personality, serious 



10 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

consequences to the future integrity and happiness 
of the young people might be forthcoming. 

4. Therefore, would not the mothers do well to 
get together and agree upon certain protections 
to supply the missing safeguards to morality? 

I proceeded on my journey to Lake Geneva, 
Wisconsin, interested to find out what eight hun- 
dred college students gathered there might be 
thinking. Some new form of socialism? League 
of nations? Olympic games? Baseball series, or 
what? To my surprise, I found them thinking pri- 
marily of the moral conditions in their colleges. 
As Y. M. C. A. men, under the inspiring leader- 
ship of "Dad" Elliott, they were working up 
plans and courage to go back into their colleges 
in the fall and start cleaning things up. What is 
,it that is to be cleaned up? Their frank stories, 
told in calm public discussion, of college dances 
from which beauty and poetry and grace had de- 
parted and in which indecency stalked the floor, 
would have been unbelievable had the witnesses 
been less credible. 

I left Lake Geneva for the midsummer heat of 
Missouri. On the way I bought a copy of the 
Atlantic Monthly. The leading article was given 
to a discussion of the same theme, this time by 
Mrs. Katherine Fullerton Gerould. The Atlantic 
is not exactly a sensational magazine, and Mrs. 
Gerould is not a muck-raker, and when this maga- 



YOUNG AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS 11 

zine gives chief prominence to such a subject, it 
may be taken for granted that the subject is vital. 
Mrs. Gerould writes of the causes : 

" 'It is the war, I believe/ said one mother, the 
other evening. 'It is the mothers,' say other 
women who keep a proper tab on their own girls. 
'It is the motor-car,' says a man who does not give 
his debutante daughter a car of her own. 'It is 
the girls: they want you to make love to them,' 
say the boys. 'It is the men: they won't dance 
with you if you wear a corset,' say the girls. 

"But it is really — is it not? — more than this. It 
is everything. That is why it seems to me that Mr. 
Grundy's final optimism is perhaps unjustified. 
Give the motor-car its due share of responsibility. 
Give the movie more blame, please, than it has 
hitherto received. Give the war some — but not 
too much ; for all this antedates the war. Give the 
radical intellectuals a little for their tendency to 
howl down everything that has ever, anywhere 
been of good repute. Give a lot of it to the luxury 
of the nouveaux riches: a luxury which inevitably, 
at first, finds expression in pampering the body. 
And give all you can heap up to the general aban- 
donment of religion. 

"For the abandonment of religion is probably 
most responsible of all, since it bears a causal re- 
lation to most of these other facts. 

"Many of my friends are not religious at all, 
although they are moral. But they were nearly 
all brought up in strict religious forms; and 
while their brains have discarded dogma, their 
characters have none the less been moulded 



12 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

by a fairly firm Christian ethic Whether they 
will be able to pass that ethic on to their children, 
without the dogma, remains most interestingly to 
be seen. At present, what they cling to most, I 
find, is the recognized social code — which itself, 
was built up largely by the Christian ethic. But 
social conditions in a modern democracy change 
so rapidly that a code with no eternal sanction is 
a weak reed to lean upon. We are enduring more 
and more in America, the influence of people who 
have broken deliberately or violently with any re- 
ligious law ; and you cannot knock away the props 
and still keep the structure. You cannot make the 
Ten Commandments potent by mere dwelling on 
their inherent felicity. If there is no divine com- 
mand back of them, they lose all power over the 
man who finds it more satisfactory to break them. 
The modesty and manly chivalry which Mr. 
Grundy sees recovering from their collapse have 
nothing at present to recover with. Religion was 
the blood in their veins. You may faint from acute 
indigestion; but of pernicious anaemia you die." 

The young people answer. Mrs. Gerould was 
promptly answered by representatives of the 
young people, who defended their actions; they 
contended they were only the expressions of frank- 
ness and as such were better than the surreptitious 
actions of their progenitors. Moreover, argued the 
young protagonists, what right had their elders to 
preach, since they were bequeathing to their chil- 
dren a world in such a horrible mess, not to men- 
tion a debt of many billions of dollars which the 



YOUNG AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS 13 

children would have to pay. The elders had failed 
so utterly to make human life either happy or 
peaceful, should not the young people now have 
their chance without any interference from the 
generation that had failed ? Did the religion about 
which the elders seem to be so anxious prevent 
the great world catastrophe? If that religion 
really had any power, why did it permit these mil- 
lions of young men's graves, these destroyed 
homes, these widows and orphans, this seething 
flood of hate which has engulfed us? 

The answer does not go deep enough. There is 
no denying that the generation that allowed the 
world to get into its present muddle is embar- 
rassed in preaching to the generation now about 
to try its hands at the world's levers. But the 
claim of the young people that the present state 
of morality is only an indication of increasing 
frankness needs examination. 

Frankness is a superficial merit. It is not dif- 
ficult of attainment for a sincere soul, either good 
or bad. It may be as well exhibited in virtue as in 
vice. Frankness is reason for no moral lapse ; it 
only makes the causes quickly apparent. But vir- 
tue is not easy to obtain. It never is attained along 
the path of least resistance. Self-indulgence, 
on the other hand, and yielding to the lusts of the 
flesh, are not only easy but temptingly easy. And 
so long as the progress of the human race depends 



14 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

upon the development of character, and character 
is attained by struggle, to choose and follow the 
upward path where the path of least resistance 
tempts downward, self-indulgent frankness exten- 
uates nothing. 

As for the surreptitious sins of the elders, there 
is no defending them ; but it would be well to re- 
member that those sins were by no means as uni- 
versal as the charge would indicate — else there 
would have been no reason for secrecy. And at 
least the guilty ones had the grace to be ashamed 
of their weakness. 

And, after all, did we arrive at the present state 
of affairs because of some inherent weakness in 
our religion and in the moral principles that gov- 
ern our social relationships, or on the other hand 
because we abandoned that religion and those 
principles ? Did Christianity fail, or did we fail 
to be Christians? 

The answer is not altogether a matter of opin- 
ion. Eecent surveys tell a story of Christian 
neglect and lost opportunities that is hard to hear. 
Parts of that story will be told later in this book, 
but here it is sufficient to mention such facts as 
these : There are fifty million people in this coun- 
try alone, above the age of nine years, who are 
not members of any church — Protestant, Catholic 
or Jewish. There are twenty-seven million Prot- 
estant children and young people under twenty- 



YOUNG AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS 15 

five years of age, who are not enrolled in any Sun- 
day-school or other religious institution for train- 
ing in spiritual matters. The average Protestant 
child who is enrolled in Sunday-school receives 
less than twenty-six hours a year of religious in- 
struction, and even that is often under teachers 
whose attendance is perfunctory and whose train- 
ing is wholly inadequate. 

The ministry of the Protestant Church has been 
increasingly inadequate for more than a genera- 
tion. The ranks of our spiritual leadership have 
been constantly depleted because we have not 
taken the pains to work out some plan by which 
the ministry could have a living wage. Is it any 
wonder that after such failure in religious educa- 
tion, when the searching test came we were found 
wanting? The great wonder is that after such 
neglect we still had enough Christianity as a na- 
tion to keep our conduct of the war clean, and to 
fight it out to victory on a higher moral plane than 
any other war has seen in human history. And if 
there can be a greater wonder than that, it is that 
we are not worse off now than we actually are. 
The religion we have, in spite of all our failures 
to live up to its highest ideals, may be thanked 
for keeping us from going back to barbarism. 

What, then, is the underlying cause of the 
moral sag? When we go deep enough in the 
anaylsis of any social relationship we strike re- 



16 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

ligious roots. Our morality and all our dealings 
with our fellow-men are influenced ultimately by 
one of two possible conceptions : God or no God. 
Multitudes have lost God. They have lost the 
sense that there is a destiny that shapes our 
ends. They have lost the sense of fellowship with 
a divine Father who rules wisely and well. Some 
have lost him in the rush of daily work; others 
have allowed their own selfishness to blind their 
eyes to the great spiritual forces and truths of 
life. There is no body of men or women or young 
people anywhere more in need of sympathy than 
these who have lost God. They may not realize 
their pathetic condition. Like Mr. Britling before 
the war, they may boast that they have domesti- 
cated God. Or they may laugh at the idea of God 
as a grotesque fairy-tale. But their boasting is 
vain and their laughter is empty. Face to face 
with the deeper experiences of life, with marriage, 
with birth, with death, with war, they are helpless. 
There are certain practical results that follow 
in the lives of those who have lost God — if they 
are consistent. If there is no such thing as the 
Fatherhood of God, then the brotherhood of man 
is a mere sentimentality. If the world is not gov- 
erned by a Supreme Intelligence who is wise and 
merciful; if, instead, it is governed by a blind 
mechanical force that works by chance in- 
stead of by law, then this business of religion 



YOUNG AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS 17 

and faith and brotherhood is all nonsense. Life, 
then, is a matter of hammer and anvil, and we 
want to be the hammer. Might then makes right. 
We want our place in the sun. If any little Bel- 
gium stands in the way, let her be crushed and 
kicked out of the way. We are not our brothers' 
keepers. We will live without consideration for 
others. As for morality, whatever we want to 
do and can successfully carry through, we have a 
right to do without asking favor of God or man. 
For our fathers' Saturday night family altar and 
Sunday morning church, we will substitute Satur- 
day night poker and Sunday morning grouch. 
For their Bible reading and hymn singing, we will 
substitute Ibanez and jazz. For their walks and 
talks with God, we will substitute our own cheek- 
to-cheek dances. And we will boast of the prog- 
ress we have made since our fathers and mothers 
were young. 

That, of course, is the extreme case of those who, 
consciously or unconsciously, go upon the suppo- 
sition that there is no God. Only a few go to that 
extreme ; but many live somewhere along the way, 
and it is this living somewhere along the way 
that is ultimately responsible for the gospel of 
self-interest and for the present sag in morality. 
No other explanation so adequately accounts for 
the facts, and no other is so true to human experi- 
ence. 



18 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

What may this moral sag do to you? So much 
for the general condition and its cause. Now the 
question is : What may this moral sag do to you 
who are now facing the choice between a life of 
self-interest and a life of service? You cannot 
escape its effects so long as you live in human so- 
ciety. You may keep yourself unspotted, but you 
may not keep yourself unhurt. Sin is a social 
thing. It reaches out and stabs those who are near 
and dear to us. Your brother, your sister, your 
friend may say, "I am going to live my own life," 
but no one lives his own life. It cannot be done. 
We are all members one of another. If your 
brother or your friend follows the path of least 
resistance and allows his moral relationships with 
others to be governed by self-interest and self-in- 
dulgence, sooner or later he will do the same with 
you. Even if he continues his respect for you, 
will it be a pleasant thing for you to watch day by 
day the death of his finer sensibilities and the 
passing of beauty from his life? And your sister 
or your sweetheart — will you be unaffected when 
she reaches the end of the road she is traveling 
so light-heartedly and finds that at the end of the 
road is just a moral dump-heap? Will it be noth- 
ing to you to see her sitting in the ashes of virtue 
and love and beauty? 

But it is quite possible that you may not keep 
yourself unspotted. The temptation to go with 



YOUNG AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS 19 

the crowd is more than many of us can bear. If 
the crowd sanctions a sin, we begin by abhorring 
it, then we endure it, and finally, we embrace it. 
This is the traditional way — the primrose path. 
Follow it, and it will be you who will land on the 
moral dump-heap, and your family and your 
friends who will suffer. It will be your talents 
dissipated and your possibilities for usefulness 
embezzled. 

What will it do to America? Suppose the 
moral sag and the philosophy of godlessness that 
underlies it should have its way with the young 
people of America. What will be the effect upon 
our national life, our business, our art, our music, 
our whole progress. Our national ideals of broth- 
erhood, civil and religious freedom, and asylum 
for the oppressed of all nations would eventually 
be discarded, for they all rest upon the faith in 
God that dominated the founders of this republic. 
We, assuming that we were consistent, would 
gradually supplant those ideals with ideals of 
power and expansion, of wealth and dominion. 
Business could not escape the effects of godless- 
ness. For what heart or enthusiasm could a busi- 
ness man put into his work when the sanctity of 
his home and the virtue of his children had de- 
parted? Music and art would glorify the mate- 
rial and the sensual rather than the spiritual, for 
you cannot glorify the spiritual without in the end 



\ 
s 

\ 



20 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

becoming spiritual, and then you would be not far 
from God who is himself spirit. 

What may you do to it? But there is a more 
important question before us. It is, What may 
you do to this moral sag? For with your light and 
training there goes a corresponding amount of re- 
sponsibility. To show what you may do is the 
purpose of this book. 

The choice before you is a life of self-interest 
or a life of service. Just as self-interest is rooted 
in a conscious or unconscious faith that there is no 
God, so a life of service is rooted in the faith that 
there is a God. This is not the place to write a 
compendium of theology, or even to try to set down 
all the essentials of the Christian faith about God. 
But if we are rightly to understand what a life of 
service really means, and wherefrom it draws its 
inspiration, we must know something of the faith 
on which it rests. So let us consider a very few 
of the fundamentals. 

The faith basis for a life of service. "In the 
beginning God." That is the foundation of our 
religion. Faith in God has been the guiding prin- 
ciple in the great forward movements in human 
history from the migration of Abraham and the 
exodus of the Israelites to the venture of the Pil- 
grim Fathers and our own day. The outstanding 
leaders of every generation have been men and 
women whose lives were rooted in God. Socrates, 






YOUNG AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS 21 

Moses, David, Isaiah, Savonarola, Luther, Wash- 
ington, Gladstone, Lincoln — it was in him that 
they lived and moved and had their being. Face 
to face with the greatest struggles of their own 
generation, they found God their strength and 
met persecution and death itself with confident 
courage. 

God is here. If you have thought of God only 
as a majestic being, sitting away off in space, on 
a great white throne, looking at this world as you 
look at an ant hill, and occasionally reaching down 
to break through the laws of nature to work a 
miracle — you have one of the greatest experiences 
in life in store for you. It is to discover that God 
is in you, in the human beings around you, and in 
all nature. He is in the song of the birds, the 
glory of the flowers, the heart of every man. The 
laws of nature are simply his kindly every-day 
ways of dealing with us. It is the God in you call- 
ing to the God in the other man that makes friend- 
ship. God in the other man reaching out with un- 
derstanding to heal your bruised heart — that is 
sympathy. It is the indwelling God that makes 
beauty in art, truth in poetry, and goodness in 
man. 

Surely Jesus was proclaiming the indwelling 
God when he said, "He that hath seen me hath 
seen the Father,' ' " Abide in me and I in you," 
and, "I am the vine, ye are the branches." It 



22 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

was of the indwelling God that Mrs. Browning 
wrote : x 

" Earth's crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God ; 
But only he who sees takes off his shoes. " 

It was in the joyful conviction of the presence 
of God here and now that Tennyson said to you 
and tome: 2 

"Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with 

Spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than 

hands and feet." 

A living, indwelling God — hold on to him. He 
was your forefathers' help in ages past; he will 
be your hope in years to come. This is his world, 
not yours, his forces are stronger than the forces 
of evil. Put your trust in him. 

"The everlasting God, Jehovah, the Creator of 
the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is 
weary; there is no searching of his understand- 
ing. He giveth power to the faint; and to him 
that hath no might he increaseth strength. Even 
the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young 
men shall utterly fall ; but they that wait for Jeho- 
vah shall renew their strength; they shall mount 
up with wings as eagles ; they shall run and not be 
weary ; they shall walk and not faint. ' ' x 

1 Atvrora Leigh. Book VII. The Higher Pantheism. 

2 The Higher Pantheism. 



YOUNG AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS 23 

Jesus and the Kingdom of God. Next to a vital 
faith in an indwelling God, the most important 
thing for you to have today as a foundation for 
a life of service is an understanding of Jesus and 
the Kingdom of God, and the part redemptive love 
and leadership have played in the drama of human 
progress. Christians throughout the world have 
come to celebrate as the greatest days in their 
calendar, Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter. 
Each one of these days commemorates a great act 
in the human drama — an act not historical only, 
but one which takes place in the experience of 
every Christian. And each one stands for a con- 
viction. 

What does Christmas celebrate? The birth of 
one little child in a stable. That child never held 
a scepter in his hand. No crown ever rested on 
his head except a crown of thorns. No army ever 
followed him to victory. No nation ever pro- 
claimed him its founder or its leader. He never 
cried for a place in the sun. His life was lived in 
poverty in a small province. He never traveled 
more than one hundred and fifty miles from the 
place of his birth. Yet nineteen centuries after 
his death the majority of the nations of the civ- 
ilized world agree that this child was more im- 
portant to them than the foundations of their gov- 
ernments, the struggles of their pioneers, or the 

1 Isaiah 40: 28-31. 



24 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

victories of their armies. They join hands across 
the sea in giving him honor. More than a billion 
people on Christmas day fling to the winds their 
differences and rejoice together in the spirit of 
this child. And a billion people with one accord 
celebrate the day in the same way — by giving 
each other gifts. 

Why? Why do the majority of the nations 
count this child so important? Why do they cele- 
brate his birth with gifts? It is because they be- 
lieve that he gave to the human race more than 
any other man ever gave. What did he give? 
What is the great present that he brought in those 
empty hands of his ? He brought Hope — the hope 
of a new world. As he taught men, they began to 
see rising out of the ashes of tyranny a new gov- 
ernment, a government that would protect and 
develop, a great cooperative commonwealth that 
has been the dream of all the founders of nations 
since that day. In the place of a degenerate em- 
peror they saw a new leader, a mighty counselor, a 
prince of peace. Nation would no longer lift up 
sword against nation, neither would they learn 
war any more. And out of the ruins of their old 
temples they began to see that God would raise 
up a newer, holier temple. The time had come 
when men must know that "God is a Spirit: and 
they that worship him must worship in spirit and 
truth.' ' They must become connected with God. 



YOUNG AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS 25 

Out of the loins of this race of men they began 
to hope for a new race — stronger, nobler, and 
more God-like. This was the hope he brought. He 
called it the Kingdom of God. This is the hope 
that still shapes the world. For that government, 
that religion, and that race of men, we are still 
striving. 

And what does Good Friday celebrate? Good 
Friday celebrates the sacrifice Jesus had to make 
of his life. Picture the scene. The man who 
brought this hope to the human race is hanging on 
a cross. Over his head is the sneering sign, "This 
is Jesus, King of the Jews. ' ' On either side hangs 
a thief. Around his feet sit the soldiers casting 
lots for his garments. About him on that barren 
hill called "the place of the skull,' ' he looks down 
into the upturned faces of the thousands who less 
than a week before were calling him "king" and 
"son of God." The world has scorned the hope 
which this man has brought. Men have laughed at 
his dreams and ridiculed his faith. But he has 
clung to his hope in spite of their laughter and 
their crucifixion. And his last words are, 
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do." Darkness falls upon the scene. The 
people drift away. The Roman soldiers go back 
to the town. Jesus is left alone on the cross, a 
crown of thorns on his head, a spear thrust in his* 



CHAPTER TWO 

The Way of the Crowd 

Suppose you choose the path of service: what 
then? Are you hailed as a hero or heroine? 
You are not. Is the path a path of roses? It is 
not. Can you always be sure which way it leads 
and what is the service to be rendered? You can 
not. Will you be regarded as an interferer in 
other people 's business ? Perhaps. Will they mis- 
understand your motives? Possibly. Will you 
have to make sacrifice ? Probably. Will you have 
much opposition? The greater the service, the 
greater the opposition to be overcome. Will you 
at least have the gratitude of those you are trying 
to serve? In some cases, yes; in others, no. Will 
you have to bear much pain? It is quite possible. 
Will you have to walk alone? Much of the way. 

It has always been so. When Jesus sent out 
seventy disciples to render a great service to the 
people, he said, "Behold I send you forth as lambs 
in the midst of wolves.'' Those seventy men had 
■no motive but the highest motive of human service. 
They carried no weapons, no purses, nothing but 
their great passion for serving human souls. Yet 
sometimes whole cities put the ban of outlawry 

29 



30 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

upon them and refused to allow them even to 
enter. Sometimes they were cast into prison. 
They met pointing fingers and sneering faces and 
cold disdain. Sometimes they were near death 
with their sufferings. 

The writer of Hebrews, in that sublime chap- 
ter recording the victories of faith, says: "And 
others had trial of mockings and scourgings, 
yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: they 
were stoned, they were sawn asunder, they were 
tempted, they were slain with the sword. They 
went about in sheepskins, in goatskins; being 
destitute, afflicted, ill-treated (of whom the world 
was not worthy), wandering in deserts, and moun- 
tains and caves, and the holes of the earth.' J l 

The next time you go through a park or a 
museum where the statues or the paintings of 
those who have rendered great service to human- 
ity are honored, think back to the days when those 
men and women were alive and rendering their 
service. Most of them bore their crosses with 
bleeding feet. Only a few months ago Joan of Arc 
was sainted by the Catholic church and millions 
of devout Catholics gave homage to her. But her 
life was full of persecution and struggle, and the 
Church was one of her persecutors. So it has al- 
ways been. Not a newspaper in the country today 
but reverences the memories of Lincoln and 

1 Hebrews 11: 36-38. 



THE WAY OF THE CROWD 31 

Roosevelt. But what ignominy half of these news- 
papers heaped upon the living heads and hearts 
of those great servants of humanity ! 

Why should it be so? Partly, of course, be- 
cause of honest misunderstanding and difference 
of opinion. And yet more because the path of 
service so often cuts squarely across the path of 
self-interest. You cannot bring freedom to slaves 
without running up against the interests of the 
slave-owners. You cannot abolish the drink evil 
without first doing battle with the men who make 
money by the manufacture and sale of drink. You 
cannot even clean up the moral conditions of your 
college without interfering with someone's profit 
or someone's pleasure. But the greatest reason 
for the struggle of the prophet and the pioneer 
and the reformer is the dead weight of tradition- 
alism and conservatism of the crowd. 

" But they said — " Hardly a day goes by but 
that you hear on the campus and on the street 
this phrase, "But they said." It is a phrase found 
many times in the Bible, many times in history, 
many times in daily life. There is scarcely a 
complete record of any great speech or act or life, 
but the next paragraph of the narrative begins 
with these three words, "But they said." Simple 
words they are, yet they tell a story and paint a 
picture. They tell a story of criticism, of opposi- 
tion, of resistance. They paint a picture of a 



32 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

crowd against a man, a picture of a struggle. 

Who are "they"? What are "they" saying? 
And what is the struggle about? "They" go by 
different names in different places, but "they" 
always say about the same thing, and the struggle 
is always the same struggle. It is the age-long 
struggle of the individual against that pressure 
that tries to make him think and believe and act 
like everybody else, that tries to make him conform 
to a type; the struggle of common sense against 
fashion, of progress against tradition and custom, 
of the human mind against those who would 
shackle it ; the struggle of the conscience for free- 
dom; the struggle of the prophet who comes to his 
own, to find that he must fight against his own. 
Let us look at some of the places where the text is 
found, where this struggle has taken place. Let 
us find who "they" are and what "they" have 
said and what "they" have done. 

Jesus and the crowd. Take the story of Jesus. 
In the story of his life there is scarcely a record of 
a single deed of mercy done or a single great 
teaching uttered but the next verse begins with 
some phrase such as "But they said — ." "They," 
in Jesus' time, were the Scribes and the Pharisees, 
and they were always present. Did Jesus heal a 
lame man and look up with his face aglow with the 
light of service, there, around him, were the 
Scribes and Pharisees pointing their fingers at 



THE WAY OF THE CROWD 33 

Mm, saying, "Teacher, you did that on the Sab- 
bath, and it is not lawful to heal on the Sabbath. ' ' 
Or did he heal a man, saying, ' ' Thy sins are for- 
given thee," the Scribes and the Pharisees were 
there with hands uplifted in holy horror protest- 
ing at such blasphemy. Did Jesus take dinner with 
a friendless publican, the Scribes and Pharisees 
were at the door of the house piously shaking their 
heads and murmuring against him. Did he teach 
the multitudes with authority, did he extend a 
brother's hand to the sinner and the outcast, the 
Scribes and the Pharisees were there with their 
carping criticisms. 

Always he was surrounded by that circle of 
pointing fingers and sneering faces. They blocked 
his path at every step; he could not get away 
from them. At work or at rest they gave him no 
peace. Even when he sought the Garden at night 
to pray, they were rattling the gates trying to get 
at him. Finally, when they saw that his teach- 
ing was menacing their position, they formed a 
plot against him. "They took counsel together 
that they might kill him." They went about 
among the crowds to which he was preaching and 
planted their poison leaven in the hearts of the 
ignorant. They brought about his crucifixion. 
They hounded him to death. Then they stood at 
the foot of the cross and looked up and cried, 
"Now, if you are our Master save yourself." 



34 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

Jesus ' attitude toward them was the attitude of 
a man toward his greatest foe. We hear a great 
deal about Jesus' patience; but Jesus had no pa- 
tience with them. We hear a great deal about his 
gentle, loving words ; but he had no gentle, loving 
words for the Scribes and Pharisees. The strong- 
est language to be found in the Bible is that in, 
which he condemns them: "Fools," "Hypo- 
crites," "Sons of Hell." Is there anything gen- 
tle or loving about those names? 

"They" in history. "But," you say, "the 
Scribes and the Pharisees didn't last long." Not 
under that name, no. But the type for which 
they stood has been in existence since the world 
began, and it is likely to last as long as the world 
lasts. It does not matter about their name ; they 
are not confined to any creed or any people or 
any place. They are as wide-spread as the human 
race, and their best name is just They. How else 
can they be denoted — that critical, conservative, 
conventional crowd that blindly follows its leaders, 
that accepts without question whatever traditions, 
customs, and superstitions are handed down? 
They are those who build their houses on that 
part of the path of Progress on which they were 
born, never get beyond it, and strive to keep 
others from getting beyond it. Their faces are al- 
ways set toward the past, and their god is the 
god of Yesterday. Wherever you have a man 



THE WAY OF THE CROWD 35 

standing out against a crowd for what he thinks 
is right or what he thinks is true, and the crowd 
is trying to hush his voice by ridicule or violence, 
there you have They — no matter what other name 
you call them. They have been the murderers of 
the prophets and the foes of the pioneers of all 
the ages. Every page of history, secular and 
Christian, is red with the blood that They have 
drawn. 

Think of Stephen, the man who had the courage 
to stand up and tell the Jews that the man whom 
they had put to death was his Lord and Master 
and theirs too. Around him stand They, and they 
stop their ears and tear their hair and they 
take this Stephen from the court-room out beyond 
the city wall, and there they stone him to death. 

Think of another court-room scene. A little 
man on fire with a great idea has just finished a 
wonderful speech before the king and his court. 
On trial for his life, he has pleaded not for his life, 
but for the cause for which he stood. But they 
say, "Paul, Paul, you are mad, mad!" and they 
mock him. 

Pass over several centuries. We are in an- 
other court-room. A man is being tried as a crim- 
inal. Who is it? Martin Luther. What has he 
done? He has done some original thinking in 
theology. They cannot tolerate anything like that. 
If there is one thing more than another that the 



36 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

crowd will not tolerate, it is the original thing, 
whether it be an original thought or theory or an 
original dress or hat. Original things must fight 
to survive. 

But come out of the court-room into the church. 
Here is a man sitting at a table signing a paper. 
Over him stands the pope, and around him stand 
They watching him sign it. Who is this? This 
is Galileo: he has the sinful audacity to declare 
that the earth actually moves, and They are mak- 
ing him sign a paper saying it does not move — and 
they can quote a Scripture to prove it. He has to 
sign the paper or be excommunicated, but all the 
time he is whispering under his breath, "But it 
does move just the same." 

It is not simply in religious matters and church 
affairs that this struggle is fought. It is in every 
sphere of human activity. Here is a man in 
prison, sitting in chains. Who is he, and what 
has he done? His name is Columbus, and he is 
here because They put him here, and They put 
him here because he insists that he has found the 
East by sailing West, which, of course, is a self- 
evident piece of lunacy, and he is a dangerous 
man. 

Here is a certain old poet with a manuscript 
under his arm. He takes it to the publishers, and 
They read it. Then they ask him why he doesn't 
write like other people. They cannot give him 



THE WAY OF THE CROWD 37 

more than five pounds for this. So John Milton 
sells Paradise Lost for five pounds. 

And here is another literary man. He is cool- 
ing his heels on Lord Chesterfield's back stoop. 
He is waiting for a job — any kind of job that 
will keep body and soul together. "Who is he? 
Samuel Johnson. Yes, he has already written 
some of the works that you study as classics, but 
They don't like them. They are not the kind of 
works that other people have written. 

And here stand They sneering and scoffing at 
Robert Stephenson and his steam horse. They 
walk all around it, and they laugh in that knowing 
way they have, and they ask, "But what will your 
steam horse do when there is a cow on the track!" 
And they cannot see the humor in the reply, "It 
wad be verra awkward for the coo." 

So the long list of crimes runs on. They burned 
to death Ridley and Latimer and Huss and Savo- 
narola ; They deserted Hendrick Hudson in a little 
rowboat on the ocean's swell — left him alone with 
his "crazy ideas." They laughed at Marconi's 
dream of a wireless telegraph, and They ridiculed 
as preposterous the Wright brothers' "flyin' do- 
funnies." They cracked jokes about Beethoven 
and Wagner ! 

Following the crowd. "Well, well," you say, 
"They are gone now, and we are rid of them; we 
live in an age of freedom." But do we? Are 



38 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

you sure about that? Are you quite sure that 
They are not still influencing us, that we are 
not following the crowd? Are you quite sure 
that we are standing up for our own con- 
victions and our own thoughts and our own 
consciences without caring what the crowd may 
think? How many of us before doing a single 
act have ceased to ask, "What will They say?" 
Are you quite sure that that pressure which tries 
to make us all alike is gone? Are you quite sure 
that it is an easy thing nowadays to have a mind 
of one's own? Are you quite sure that the path 
of Progress has become an easy path? 

Ask any statesman who has tried to keep public 
sentiment on a high moral plane since the war. 
Ask "Pussyfoot" Johnson, the prohibition cru- 
sader who lost an eye in a riot which his campaign 
in England started. Ask any teacher, any minis- 
ter, any missionary who has tried to lead men's 
spirits upward along the path of duty. Ask any 
social worker who has tried to bring social justice 
a little nearer reality. Ask the Chinese mother, 
whose son, convicted of plotting against the gov- 
ernment was sentenced to death. Just before he 
was to be executed, the mother wrote this letter : 

"A man came to us secretly last night and 
offered to effect my son's escape for fifty thousand 
taels. He said that arrangements could be made 
to get him out of the country — and we have re- 



THE WAY OF THE CROWD 39 

fused ! We told him we could give no answer until 
the morning, and I walked the floor the long night 
through, trying to find the pathway just. 

"We cannot do it. China is at the parting of 
the ways; and if we, her first officials, who are 
taking the stand upon the side of justice and new 
ideas of honor, do not remain firm in hours of 
great temptation, what lesson have we to give to 
them who follow where we lead? It must not be 
said that our first acts were those of bribery and 
corruption. If my son is a traitor, we let him 
pay. He must give his life upon the altar of new 
China. We cannot buy his life. We are of the 
house of Liu, and our name must stand so that, 
through the years to come, it will inspire those 
who follow us to live and die for China, the coun- 
try that we love." 

Yes, the old struggle is still going on. They are 
still here, making things hard for those who choose 
the path of service. The thing that really matters 
most, however, is that we are often found on the 
wrong side of the struggle, that we often seem to 
care more for what They say than what our own 
consciences dictate. And we find ourselves doing 
things we know we ought not to do, because other 
persons are doing them. 

Conscience and the crowd. A railroad presi- 
dent was on trial for giving freight rebates. When 
asked why his road had done it, his answer was, 
"The rest of the roads did." 

Not far from New York is a camp for New York 



40 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

City boys. Near that camp is an apple orchard, 
and the boys are forbidden to go into the orchard 
until the apples are ripe. Nevertheless, strange 
as it may seem, the boys sometimes sneak into 
it, and when they are caught and asked why they 
have disobeyed the rules, the invariable answer 
is, "The other fellows did." 

It disgusts one to go into some of the dance 
halls in the city and see the girls in immodest 
and often indecent dances with the men. Ask one 
of them why she does it, and the answer will most 
likely be, "The rest of the girls do, and I can't 
have a good time unless I do." And you, very 
likely, have given the same answer when you have 
been called to account for some act that seems to 
your parents immodest or lacking in reverence for 
womanhood. 

Ask the drunkard why he took his first drink. If 
he can remember so far back, he will tell you that 
it wasn't because he wanted it, or because he 
thought it would do him any good. He took it 
because They wanted him to. They had to put 
their arms about him; They almost had to force 
it down his throat. Yes, we do things we ought 
not to because They do. 

And we are afraid to do the things we ought 
to do, from fear of them. " Oh ! what will They 
say!" we exclaim. And the fear of what They 
might say is often sufficient to drown the voice of 



THE WAY OF THE CROWD 41 

duty and make us ashamed of our noblest im- 
pulses. 

They make cowards of us. We should like to 
patch up that quarrel with the old friend, but we 
are afraid They will say we are weakening. 

We should like to tell So-and-So in the spirit of 
friendship that we think he is making a fool of 
himself, that he isn't living up to the best there 
is in him, that he is going to wake up some day 
and find himself on the moral dump-heap, but we 
are afraid They will say we are intruding. 

Y?e should like to give a helping hand to a 
stranger, but we are afraid They will say we are 
forward. 

We should like to discontinue some of the ways 
we have fallen into, but we are afraid somebody 
will say something — call us "goody-goody" or say 
we are getting converted, — and of course we could 
never stand that. 

We should like to join the church, but we are 
afraid that those who know our sins will say, 
" Just look at that young hypocrite !" 

We should like to stand out in our schools and 
colleges and young people's gatherings every- 
where for standards that are high and clean, — 
but what will They say ! 

We too should like to stand up for our convic- 
tions, just as Stephen and Luther and Savonarola 
stood up for theirs, but we are afraid, not of tor- 



42 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

ture or fire or anything physical, but of what 
They will say. 

Summed up in a single sentence, this is the 
situation: The age-long struggle between service 
and self-interest, between the individual and the 
institution, between progress and custom, between 
the prophet and his people, between conscience 
and the crowd, is not yet over. We are still doing 
what "the rest of them do," and we are afraid 
to do what we know we ought to do for fear of 
what They will say. Over against this fact set 
the fundamental fact of the Christian faith : 

God is stronger than They. The "power out- 
side of ourselves that works for righteousness ' J 
is not working in vain. God is marching on. 
His purpose shall be realized. His children shall 
be cared for. 

"Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on 

the throne, — 
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the 

dim unknown, 
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch 

above his own. ' ' x 

" Keeping watch above his own." "His own" 
is a mighty army made up of the prophets and 
the martyrs, the sages and the seers, the number- 
less courageous and determined souls of all the 
ages. Strong men are wanted in that army. No 

1 The Present Crisis, James Russell Lowell. 



THE WAY OF THE CROWD 43 

cowards need apply. It is a brave army, and 
it has a big work to do. It needs young men 
and women who care not what They say, who are 
ready to endure persecution, who are able to say, 

"What matter though I stand alone? 
I wait with joy the coming years, 
My heart shall reap where it has sown 
And garner up its fruits of tears!" 

The path of service is a rugged path, but those 
who climb it are assured of ultimate victory. Dr. 
James G. K. McClure tells the story of Arthur 
Cumnock and his fight at Harvard. He entered 
Harvard College when the moral standard among 
many of the students was low. Ideals were in 
the shadow. Character was a romantic thing 
for the sentimental only. But young Cum- 
nock lived his four years strongly and steadily, 
keeping the best to the front and making his life 
count by way of example and influence. It was 
up-hill work, but one by one other men took the 
same stand, and when Class Day of his senior year 
came, and the class wished to acknowledge the 
strongest one of them all and the man who had 
done most to tone up the life of the college until 
purity and good held highest place, they singled 
out Arthur Cumnock and gave him their united 
honor. 

They may call you "fool" now, your best 



44 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

friends may call you "fool"; but if the experi- 
ence of the past is valid, your children and your 
children's children will call you " Saint,' ' and 
their judgment will be right. You may not be 
popular ; but you will be respected. You may not 
have the most pleasant time in the world ; but you 
will be useful. Your feet may climb a rugged 
road, and deep into your side may be thrust the 
spear ; but you will be making your life count for 
something. And the indwelling God whispers, 
"Lo, I am with you alway." 



CHAPTER THREE 

Wheke Does Seevice Begin 

The greatest task. The most immediate and 
fundamental need in America today is a conver- 
sion of the spirits of men. Somehow we must 
convert the spirit of suspicion into a spirit of 
faith; the spirit of getting into a spirit of giving; 
the spirit of hate into a spirit of love ; the spirit 
of selfishness into a spirit of service. 

The first step, if we follow the method of Jesus, 
will not be to blow up the present society or to 
try to kick to pieces everything our fathers have 
built up for us. Jesus never used dynamite ; He 
used leaven. He occasionally worked miracles on 
men's bodies, but his greatest miracles were in 
their spirits. Once he could get working in the 
hearts of men the leaven of his teaching about 
the living, indwelling God, he was confident of 
the result. And so may we be. 

Begin with your own community. The first 
service lies there. You are the center of it. Let 
the indwelling God convert whatever of suspicion, 
selfishness, and greed there may be in you into 
faith and love and service. That is your first 
big service problem. The next is to try to help 

45 



46 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

others do the same — your family, your school- 
mates, your neighbors. 

But how? Not by argument or by preaching 
or by dynamite; but by the contagion of your 
spirit. "Christianity is caught— not taught.' ' 
There is nothing more contagious in the world 
than a cheerful, hopeful spirit. One thorough- 
going intelligent Christian in a home, a school, 
a neighborhood is a more powerful leaven for 
righteousness and for happiness than any amount 
of money or any number of organizations. 

The cheerful spirit does not content itself with 
being cheerful and hopeful. It does not sit with 
folded hands. It is the most active spirit, the 
most unconfinable thing imaginable. It is forever 
at work trying to get God's will done in the 
world. And it is as you forget yourself in the 
task of getting God's will done in the world that 
your family, your schoolmates, and your neigh- 
bors see your spirit working and are caught by 
its contagion. Your church is one of the channels 
through which you may work. Your family, your 
friends, your schoolmates are other channels. 

The first enemy to be overcome is the nearest 
obstacle that limits men and women or boys and 
girls from developing the divine possibilities God 
has given them. It may be a "blind pig" or a 
gambling joint, a public dance-hall or a low pool- 
room. On the other hand, it may be a weak and 



WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 47 

inefficient school, a grinding form of industry, a 
slum condition, or a neglected public health prob- 
lem. Or it may be a lowering of the moral 
standards such as we considered in our first 
chapter. Whatever the obstacle, it is a challenge 
to you. Destroy it. Eemove it. God is with 
you — what matter if all the powers of evil be 
against you? 

When you have given your friendship and the 
contagion of your spirit, you have started on the 
right road. Just how far you will get along that 
road will depend largely upon how much courage 
and especially how much persistence and training 
you can muster. Emerson said, "A hero is no 
braver than "an ordinary man, but he is braver 
five minutes longer." If you can champion an 
unpopular Christian cause in your community, 
and undergo the misunderstanding and criticism 
which usually attends the beginning of such a 
work, and stick to it until you have created a 
public sentiment on behalf of your cause, and 
until you have guided it to a permanent place 
in the life of the community, you will have 
become one of the great succession — a true leader 
along the road of Progress. To do it, you will 
need not only your friendship and your spirit of 
helpfulness; you will need training in method, 
training in facts about the cause you champion, 
training in the intimate knowledge of the ways 



48 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

and customs of the people you are trying to serve, 
and in the particular line of your service, whether 
it is nursing or teaching, language or civil gov- 
ernment, religion or music. 

Working with God. William James, who led 
thousands of men's minds through the dark 
gorges of doubt and fear to the light of faith, 
chose deliberately not only the path of service 
but the method by which he proposed to follow 
it. In 1899 he wrote a letter to a friend in which 
these illuminating words are found: 

"As for me, my bed is made : I am against big- 
ness and greatness in all their forms, and with the 
invisible molecular forces that work from individ- 
ual to individual, stealing in through the crannies 
of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the 
capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the 
hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give 
them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the 
hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is 
the life displayed. So I am against all big organ- 
izations as such, national ones first and foremost; 
against all big successes and big results; and in 
favor of the eternal forces of truth which always 
work in the individual and immediately unsuccess- 
ful way, under-dogs always, till history comes 
after they are long dead and puts them on the 
top. 7 

Note especially these words : "I am in favor of 
the eternal forces of truth which always work in 
the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, 



WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 49 

under-dogs always, till history comes after they 
are long dead and puts them on the top." They 
sound very much like a saying of Jesus' : " Blessed 
are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." 

That calls to mind a story. A magazine once 
offered a framed motto, "Blessed are the meek," 
to any meek person who had made good. Dr. 
Frank Crane answered this magazine. After re- 
minding the editor that meekness is humility, he 
wrote : 

"And what is humility? It is the wish to 
be great and the dread of being called great. 
It is[ the wish to help and the dread of 
thanks. It is the love of service and the dis- 
taste for rule. It is trying to be good and blush- 
ing when caught at it. It is loyalty to truth and 
reality and hate of sham and seeming. 

"In all the real things of life it is only the 
meek who inherit. In love it is the meek who sit 
upon thrones, and it is the proud who bow down 
to them; in art it is the meek alone who have 
eyes to see the shy secrets of nature and the grace 
to interpret them fitly; in science it is the meek 
alone who have the subtle instinct for truth; in 
goodness it is only the meek who have that rare 
flower of unconscious purity; and in life's sterner 
affairs, before the furies of sickness, failure, 
calamity and death, it is only the meek who stand 



50 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

calm and ready, while the braggarts tremble, 
whine, and flee. 

"Who of us, in his serious hour, would not 
rather be found worthy to stand beside old 
Socrates, poisoned like a rat in a hole, and Jesus, 
hung to die between two thieves, and Lincoln, 
shot down like a dog, than to be brother to the 
last devious money lord or political baron who 
has schemed and bludgeoned his way to the king- 
ship of these times? 

"To furnish the cheapest kind of prize to all 
the meek who make good would bankrupt a mil- 
lionaire. For all over the world among simple 
folk, unwept, unhonored, and unsung, each faith- 
ful in his small corner, are myriads of brave, 
helpful souls, who suppose themselves to be noth- 
ing, who would be amazed if told there is any- 
thing noble about them, yet who are facing life's 
responsibilities bravely and death's terrors un- 
afraid and the unknown tomorrow with cheer and 
strong hearts. No prize of men or magazines 
can reach them, for they hide; but they wear 
unseen the crown of wild olive for all that, and 
unto them shall be given the morning star. 

"They are like God; for, have you never no- 
ticed? God is so shy and humble and hidden that 
the humbugs don't believe He exists! God never 
seems to make good, until the centuries have their 
say." 




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WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 51 

What the editor did with his framed motto is 
not recorded. 

Begin your service with your own community, 
but don't stop there. America will not be Chris- 
tian until her men and women have learned "to 
seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteous- 
ness" in their individual lives, in their homes, in 
their businesses, in their government, and in 
every human relationship. We are a long way 
from that state of affairs just now and the young 
men and women who lead us to it will have plenty 
of trail blazing to do. Let us look at the great 
unfinished tasks that await the younger genera- 
tion. 

Christian Americanization in miniature. Sup- 
pose you were on board a ship that was wrecked, 
and suppose that on that ship there were, beside 
yourself, about a hundred men, women, and chil- 
dren representing nearly every nation under the 
sun. By good fortune, suppose you were all able 
to reach a small island. Suppose, also, that there 
were small chance of any of you ever going back 
to your original homes or getting away from the 
island. What would you do? Would the two or 
three Americans form one small colony, the 
Italians another, the Hungarians another, the 
Eussians another, and so on? And then would 
you each strive to live to yourselves with no 
regard for the others except for what you could 



52 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

get out of them? Or would you try to get to- 
gether, pooling your fortunes, your best tradi- 
tions, your education, and your culture? Would 
you not say, "Here we are, for better or worse. 
The thing for us to do is to make the best of it. 
Let us adopt the motto, 'all for each and each 
for all.' Let those of us who are educated share 
our education with those who are less fortunate. 
Let those of us who know how to make two blades 
of grass grow where only one grew before now 
grow them for the benefit of all. Let those who 
are skilled with their hands devote that skill to 
our common welfare. Let our doctor serve not 
only the Americans but the entire community. 
Let our minister not try to convert us all to his 
particular denomination but, to the best of his 
ability, let him endeavor to bring us all into fel- 
lowship with God." 

The same task multiplied by one million. Now 
the first part of this situation is practically what 
has happened in America only on a larger scale. 
Instead of there being a hundred of us, there are 
something more than a hundred million of us. 
And instead of landing all at once, we have come 
on the instalment plan. The Indians on the reser- 
vations are practically the only people in this 
country who are not immigrants. During the 
past century 34,000,000 men, women, and children 
have come to this country from other lands. At 



WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 53 

this writing some 3,000 more every day are enter- 
ing our doors. 

But the second part of this island-situation we 
have not yet worked out. The various nation- 
alities that have come to this larger island are 
still, for the most part, living to themselves. We 
have each transplanted to this country the habits 
of life, the racial antagonisms, the religious dif- 
ferences of the old world. To a large extent we 
have even retained our own languages. We have 
not shared our wisdom and our skill. For the 
most part we have not served each other except 
at the point of necessity. The unfinished business 
which the older generation is now handing on to 
the younger generation is the task of melting all 
these races together and out of the best in each 
of us making a new nation. 

The first thing to do is to find out who these 
immigrants are. Where have they come from? 
Why have they come? What do they find? What 
do they do? Where and how do they live? What 
are their needs ? 

Where have they come from? Those who came 
when your grandfather was a boy were from 
Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandi- 
navia. They were Christians, for the most part, 
and knew something at least about representa- 
tive government. Those who have been coming 
for the last thirty or forty years, however, have 



54 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

been mostly Italians, Austrians, Hungarians, 
Poles, Russians, Bohemians, and Magyars. They 
do not know our language, our customs, our form 
of government, or our Bible, 

Why have they come? In general there are 
three reasons. First, they have come to escape 
intolerable living conditions in their home coun- 
tries. Each nationality, of course, has its own 
peculiar problems, but poverty and oppression, 
starvation of body and cramping of soul seem 
to be common in the Old World. Kenneth L. 
Eoberts in an article in the Saturday Evening 
Post thus describes living conditions among the 
poor in Warsaw: 

"At intervals between the shops there are 
little archways leading into dirty courtyards; 
round the courtyards rise the tenement houses 
in which the prospective emigrants live. There 
was one tenement house in Warsaw in which 3,000 
persons were living. It didn't look large; but 
every inch of space was utilized. There were 
families sleeping under staircases and living 
along the walls of hallways. Three families, of 
eight, ten, and even fifteen people apiece, were 
living together in one medium-sized room with no 
partitions of any sort to separate them. The 
cellar, as stuffy and dark as a mine tunnel, was 
crowded with people. These people, and the 
people in scores of other buildings that I visited 
in the quarter, lived exclusively on black bread, 
beans, bad beets, and half-rotten potatoes. They 



WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 55 

lived on such fare as this long before the war. 
Under the Kussians, the Hebrews of Russian 
Poland were oppressed in various ways; and on 
this oppression is blamed the poverty of the bulk 
of them. These are the conditions that exist in 
all Jewish ghettos in Poland." 

If you lived in such conditions, wouldn't you 
wish to escape from them? It is probably an 
extreme picture, but the conditions could be far 
less extreme and still be intolerable to the human 
flesh and even more intolerable to the human 
spirit. 

Second, they have come to obtain for them- 
selves some of the blessings which they have 
heard are as free as the air in America. The 
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness 
is so taken for granted by those of us who were 
born in America that we cannot appreciate how 
heavenly that principle seems to those who live 
in squalor and in subjection to unjust hardships. 
The golden streets of Paradise seem no more 
wonderful to them than America's free school 
system or our public hospitals and dispensaries. 

Third, they have come to get some of the "big 
money" which they have heard it is so easy 
to earn in America. Before the war, most of 
the steamship companies had agents scattered 
throughout Europe drumming up emigrants for 
America. These agents worked on commission. 



56 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

Every steamship ticket sold meant so much 
money in their pockets. As a result, many of 
them, in their desire for larger commissions, 
painted pictures of America that we who live 
here would hardly recognize. Many poor people 
gained the impression that gold could be scraped 
up from the gutters or shaken from the trees. 
"If they (the steamship agents) could per- 
suade anybody to go to America by assuring 
him that American hens were in the habit of 
laying diamond-studded earrings on Mondays 
and platinum watches on Fridays, they would 
gladly do so. And in many cases they did. The 
steamship agents who stimulate emigration have 
vanished; but the fairy-tales they told about 
America are still related to infants." 

Much of the impression of America's wealth is 
based on more substantial foundation than the 
tales of the steamship agents. Millions of dollars 
have been sent by earlier immigrants to relatives 
in the Old Country, and today in many parts of 
central Europe there are whole villages and com- 
munities whose chief source of income is the 
money saved by immigrants in this country and 
sent back to their homes. 

So great is the eagerness of these foreigners 
to escape their intolerable living conditions and 
to gain the blessings and the money of America, 
that they are willing to undergo all manner of 



WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 57 

perils to get here. We usually think of their 
problem as beginning with their landing at Ellis 
Island; but for many of them the journey began 
four or five or even six months before and every 
step of the way was accompanied by hardship. 
For some of them these hardships began with 
their decision to come to this country. Mr. 
Roberts, in the article mentioned before, tells a 
typical story: 

"Some of the private banks that undertake to 
send money from America to Poland handle the 
money in such a way that the person to whom 
the money is sent may consider himself fortunate 
if he gets even the short end. 

"The authorities were on the trail of the rep- 
resentative of a private banker while I was in 
Warsaw. He was a Hebrew who had emigrated 
to America in his early youth and had now come 
back to exploit his own people. Let us call him 
Jones. 

"The chief reason for Jones' unpopularity with 
the authorities lay in his tirelessness in assuring 
the poor Hebrews in the provinces that he could 
fix it up for them to get to America. In return 
for his invaluable service he demanded only a 
small amount of money — say, 500 marks, or about 
four dollars, — from each person. He had photo- 
graphs showing himself surrounded by emigrants 
whom he claimed to have taken to America. All 
the people in the photographs looked as pleased 
and smug and self-satisfied as though they had 
just come in from cleaning gold pieces off the 



58 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

pavement with a dustpan. Needless to say, it 
was a fake photograph, and Jones was no more 
capable of helping anyone get to America than 
he was of making the sun stand still by threat- 
ening it with the League of Nations.' ' 

Often the foreigner who starts for America has 
a fund of several hundred dollars, but such ras- 
cals as Jones manage to get it away from him, 
and by the time he reaches America he is almost 
destitute of money, clothing, and understanding. 
The wonder is that he is able to retain any faith 
in human nature. It is not uncommon for for- 
eigners bound for America to be kicked off trains 
and subjected to all manner of insult and abuse. 
Frequently a large part of their journey is made 
on foot. Those who have left central Europe 
have often endured from one to six months of 
travel by foot and cart and third-class carriage 
until they were finally crowded into the steerage 
of some American-bound ship. 

These facts are not recounted here for the 
purpose of stimulating sehtiment in behalf of the 
immigrant. There is altogether too much senti- 
ment already and too little action. The facts are 
related only that we may have a better under- 
standing of these men, women, and children who 
have made their way through tremendous diffi- 
culties to reach our shores, and who are now for 
better or for worse our neighbors. 



WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 59 

What do they find? When they arrive, they 
find that they did not leave behind them all 
the petty thieves and human vultures. Before 
they get settled in this country they first have 
to run the gauntlet of cab drivers, guides, fake 
lawyers, quack doctors, lodging-house keepers, 
and advisers. If the immigrant has any money 
left when he has run this gauntlet, he has earned 
it. Mr. Jerome Davis, who has made a most in- 
teresting study of the Eussians and Euthenians 
in America says: 

"The proprietors of some cheap boarding- 
houses would keep them many days under the 
pretext that only on a certain day could they get 
a train for Connecticut or California and some- 
times two days waiting for a train to Fall Eiver 
or Taunton. 

"Jitney drivers and teamsters would charge 
fabulous amounts to carry them and their small 
baggage to the railroad station. In a single day 
a jitney driver obtained about $300 — only from 
carrying immigrants from the State Pier to the 
Union Station, while for the same distance an 
electric car or a regular jitney would charge only 
six cents. One and two dollars per capita was a 
very common charge, and a taxi driver charged 
a poor immigrant $10 to carry him within a dis- 
tance of a half-mile." 

Next they find employers, even among their 
own people who have preceded them, who are 



60 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

willing to exploit them. They find unscrupulous 
politicians who herd them to the polls and vote 
them in blocks. They find padrones and con- 
tractors who colonize them and shut them out 
from contact with true American life. They find 
in place of the cathedrals in the Old Country, the 
bare uninviting mission halls on side streets, and 
they find Christianity divided into more than two 
hundred different denominations and almost 
equally divided in thought and force and action. 

Many of them find, too, that the trades at which 
they had become skilled in their own country are 
of no use to them over here. The Armenian, for 
example, has learned in his own country great 
dexterity with the needle. His embroideries and 
laces are world-famous, but in this country his 
handicraft is profitless to him, for we depend 
upon machinery and large scale production for 
most of our bedspreads, curtains, table linen, and 
clothing. The result is that the Armenian's skill 
is of little value to him and he must begin as a 
common laborer in this country. 

But what else do they find? Despite the mul- 
tiplied cost of living, they find the wages so much 
better than they had known in the Old Country 
that, if they are thrifty, their living conditions 
are greatly improved. They have the benefits of 
laws of sanitation not in operation in the home- 
land. After some years, they gain their chance 



WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 61 

to have a part in the government. They find 
free education for their children. They enjoy the 
privileges and advantages of our public libraries, 
our parks, and playgrounds. And more and more 
social opportunities are being planned and per- 
fected for them. 

What do they do? Of the 430,000 immigrants 
who were admitted to America during the year 
ending June 30, 1920, 12,000 classified themselves 
as professional men and women, 70,000 as skilled 
workers and 174,000 as of unskilled and miscel- 
laneous occupation. The remainder were chil- 
dren. The major part of the unskilled work of 
America and a very large part of the skilled work 
is, today, done by immigrants. Take the furnace 
in your own home for example ; the iron of which 
it is made and the coal that feeds it were probably 
dug from the earth by immigrants. The chairs 
you sit on, the bed you lie on, its sheets, its 
blankets you owe likewise to their labor. The 
same is true of the meat and sugar that you eat, 
and of your collars and cuffs, your cotton gowns 
and shirts, your suits and coats, your shoes and 
gloves and leather bags. The chances are better 
than fifty to fifty that the immigrant made these 
things for you. 

Where and how do they live? Three fourths 
of them have settled in New York, New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, New England, and the Middle 



62 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

West. Most of them have settled in the cities in 
the "little Italies," and "ghettos," "little Bo- 
hernias," and so forth. Very likely you have a 
colony of immigrants within two or three miles 
of your home. If you have not seen one and if 
you live in the East or Middle West, it will be 
easy for you to see an immigrant colony with your 
own eyes. Nothing can make the presence of the 
immigrant so real to you as that. Take New 
York City, for example. Sooner or later every- 
one visits New York. Go to Allen Street or 
Eivington or Grand. Peep into the brass-shops, 
walk along the sidewalks. Note shop-signs in 
queer characters, the pushcarts that line the way 
displaying all sorts of necessities and strange 
edibles. Listen to the bickering in alien tongues 
that goes on about the carts, watch the dark-eyed 
children warming their hands on a wintry day at 
a little corner fire or dancing merrily to a hurdy- 
gurdy, at play in the streets because home fur- 
nishes no space. 

Or choose Cleveland with its million people, 
eighty per cent of whom are classified as either 
foreign or of foreign parentage. Or choose St. 
Louis or Chicago or Detroit or Columbus or Pitts- 
burgh or Philadelphia or Baltimore. The immi- 
grants are crowding, every one of them, colony 
upon colony, mass upon mass, until American chil- 
dren of American parentage are now in the minor- 



WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 63 

ity, and children of immigrants fill the tenements 
and the schools. 

What, in the long run, are these immigrants 
going to mean to America, good or evil? What 
is America in turn going to mean to them? The 
situation is not imaginary. It exists. It will have 
to be solved in one way or another. 

Their standards of living are not American 
standards. One of the greatest issues now before 
the American people is the question, Which is the 
greater good, to preserve America's traditional 
policy of asylum for the oppressed of all nations 
and allow a comparatively unrestricted immigra- 
tion to flow into this country; or, on the other 
hand, to preserve our American standards of 
living and to that end admit only as many immi- 
grants as we can assimilate and bring rapidly 
up to American standards? A self-respecting 
American will not work in factories where there 
is insufficient light or too great nerve and muscle 
strain and where the wages are unjust, but many 
of these immigrants have no such compunctions. 
Having no traditions of decent working condi- 
tions and under the necessity of earning a living, 
they are willing to work anywhere, to eat almost 
any kind of food, and undergo injustice which no 
American would tolerate. For example, many 
Eussians in this country who at home were used 
to outdoor farm life, take positions here in fac- 



64 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

tories where the air is surcharged with chemical 
fumes and impurities as harmful. In the course 
of Mr. Jerome Davis' study of the Eussians in 
this country, he interviewed the wife of a priest 
in Hartford, Connecticut, who told him that she 
saw one Eussian boarding-house keeper in 1920 
buy 27 pounds of meat for $1.50. It was the 
cheapest there was, for the butcher picked it out 
from the scraps under the table. 

What are their needs? Their immediate needs 
are physical; proper housing, with all that it 
means in light, ventilation, and safety; just work- 
ing conditions without unnecessary danger to 
health or body; and a standard of living worthy 
of a self-respecting American neighborhood. It 
would be pure sentimentalism to say that it is 
the task of us who pride ourselves on our Ameri- 
can ancestry, to provide these physical needs. 
We have had to work for them ourselves and 
often we have had to fight for them. The work 
and the fighting made us appreciate their value 
when we secured them. The immigrant must do 
the same thing. But there is no sentimentality 
in urging that we cooperate with him for our 
mutual welfare. We must not forget that all of 
us, even the Pilgrims who came in the Mayflower, 
were originally immigrants to this country. Is it 
not our duty and privilege to pass on to these 
newcomers the rights and the liberties which we 



WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 65 

in turn inherited from our fathers? In common 
justice can we do less? 

Social needs. But greater than their physical 
needs are their social needs,— that is, their need 
of education and of our friendship and coopera- 
tion. Social workers who have given their lives 
to the task are practically unanimous in saying 
that the greatest obstacle in Christian Americani- 
zation is not the stupidity or ignorance of the 
foreigner, but the attitude of the average Ameri- 
can. Prejudice has grown up against the immi- 
grant, and that prejudice is expressed in ridicule 
and contempt. Instead of seeing in the immigrant 
the best that he has brought with him from the 
Old Country, we have persisted in seeing his 
worst,— his dirt, his ignorance, his peculiar cus- 
toms. Somehow we assume that because we have 
lived here longer and are cleaner and use better 
English — and none too good at that — we are bet- 
ter citizens than the newcomers. But in reality, 
the best American is not simply the one who has 
lived in this country the longest, but the one who 
contributes the most to the life of this nation. 

"Be your own Americanizer," is the excellent 
advice of the California State Commission on 
Immigration and Housing, and it adds the fol- 
lowing rules: 

1. Don't snub foreign people — make friends 
with them. 



66 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

2. Don't laugh at their questions about Ameri- 
can life — answer them. 

3. Don't profit by their ignorance of American 
law — help remove it. 

4. Don't distrust the foreign-born — make them 
trust you. 

5. Don't mimic their "broken" English— help 
them correct it. 

6. Don't drive the immigrant into financial 
failure — success makes for citizenship. 

7. Don't underrate his intelligence — he had 
brains enough to come here. 

8. Don't call him offensive nicknames— how 
would you like that yourself? 

9. Don't "Americanize" by fear and threats 
— "Americanize" by the square deal. 

10. Don't make the immigrant HATE America 
— make him LOVE America. 
By so doing you will strengthen America. 

In addition to these ten rules, which are prob- 
ably fundamental to any constructive effort, some 
practical plan of organization must be worked out 
by which the immigrant will be met at Ellis 
Island,— or other point of entry, — protected from 
the petty grafters who now prey upon him, taught 
the first principles of our language, our form of 
government and our standards of living, and 
finally located in that part of the country where 
his services are most needed and where he can 
contribute most to the welfare of America. 

An interesting suggestion along this line is the 




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WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 67 

recommendation of Mr. Koberts in the article 
referred to. He suggests that the government 
employ the great training camps which are now 
practically of no use to the nation as training 
camps for newly arrived immigrants. Such a 
plan as this would start them on the road to 
Americanization more effectively than would ever 
have been possible before the war. Certain it is 
that we dare not, for safety's sake if for no other 
reason, go on in our present unorganized and in- 
efficient methods of Americanization. 

Some idea of the size of the task before us may 
be gained from these words of Dr. Charles L. 
Zorbaugh upon his return a few months ago from 
a study of the leading cities in America : 

"We have touched but the fringe of this prob- 
lem. Great, untouched immigrant masses lie 
everywhere about us ; masses like the 14,000 souls 
of forty-one nationalities in East Youngstown, 
all but solidly foreign, where neglect and abuse 
blazed up in the fiery riot of 1916; or the Ham- 
tramck island of population in Detroit where 
among 48,000 souls, 80 per cent foreign born, 
there is not a single English-speaking white 
church, and only 10 per cent of the adult men are 
voters. Yet out of it in the war came the largest 
percentage of volunteers of any district in Michi- 
gan. To speak of New York is instantly to 
visualize its teeming East Side, its torrents of 
human life rushing up and down the city canyons, 
its children counting seven out of every nine chil- 



68 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

dren of school age in the metropolis, an army so 
large that if it marched ten abreast in close for- 
mation the front rank would be entering Phila- 
delphia when the rear guard crossed the Hudson. 
We have hardly made a dent in this vast alien 
mass." 

The needs of the spirit. The immigrant's 
greatest needs are spiritual. "Though the last 
foreigner should have learned the English lan- 
guage," writes Charles A. Brooks, "and the last 
foreign woman should become expert in American 
housewifery, and all should become loyal citizens 
and live up to the American standard of physical 
well-being, yet their deepest need would not be 
met. No man, foreign-speaking or American- 
born, can live by bread alone." Eemember that 
the great majority of these immigrants have come 
from a country where religion has been non- 
Protestant and the church often corrupt. The 
Bible is to the great majority of them a sealed 
book. 

All of us who live in cities have a constant 
struggle to save our own spirits from becoming 
hard and cruel. The rush of the city, the race 
for business, the roar of the traffic, the grind and 
crush of it all somehow get through our bodies 
and wear upon our souls. We must be forever 
on the lookout to see that our finer sensibilities 
are not crushed out of us, and that those gentler 



WHEBE DOES SERVICE BEGIN 60 

traits of kindness and sympathy and understand- 
ing hold their own. This struggle is hard enough 
for us who have been born in America, who know 
the customs and language of the country, and who 
have established ourselves. But the immigrant 
and especially the immigrant who works in an 
industrial community does not know our lan- 
guage, our customs, nor has he any roots in our 
soil that will steady him against the rush and 
torrent of modern industrial life. 

In Dr. Haskell's study of the Albanians he de- 
plores the fact that the Albanian transplanted to 
America all too often degenerates spiritually. He 
gets a Ford and rocking-chair, but often loses 
his chastity and the reliability which in most cases 
he brought with him. At home the pressure of na- 
tional customs and the absence of saloons kept 
the Albanian in the straight and narrow path of 
morality, but here where the chains of his moral 
traditions are no longer binding him, and where 
brothers tempt him, he soon falls. It is useless 
to try to establish in this country traditions and 
customs of Albania, but there is a more powerful 
means of redeeming those who have fallen and of 
saving those who are still on the ledge. He 
writes : 

" Those who have taken the trouble to follow 
me thus far, already have sensed my strong convic- 
tion that Christ-like personal relations of native 



10 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

Americans to new Americans go further than any- 
thing else in Christianizing and Americanizing 
the latter. The Christian landlord who takes a 
personal interest in his Albanian tenant will find 
any suggestions which he may make about the 
care and upkeep of his property cordially heeded 
in a great majority of cases. The Christian em- 
ployer who treats his Albanian employees as men 
and brothers, according to the Golden Rule, will 
draw out that instinctive loyalty which they are 
in the habit of yielding to their chieftain — and 
which eventually will go to the labor leaders if 
their employers fail to gain it. The Christians 
who call upon and invite to their home their new 
American acquaintances on a fraternal and not a 
patronizing basis, will give cheer and inspiration 
to strangers in a strange land hungering for 
friendship ; and incidentally will get some insight 
into old world ideas and customs without the 
expense of an ocean voyage. It is strange how 
people who give money to send missionaries to 
Mohammedans across the sea will live beside 
Mohammedans in their own city without estab- 
lishing a single friendly contact; yes, will let 
those Mohammedans return to the Old Country 
after years of residence in a Christian land, with- 
out having seen the inside of a Christian home 
or church.' ' 

Neighborliness. That is straight talk about 
Americans and Albanians and it applies equally 
well to the great majority of immigrants of other 
nationalities. All the laws in the world will not 



WHERE DOES SERVICE BEGIN ?1 

do half so much good to either immigrant or 
American as old-fashioned neighborliness. Neigh- 
borliness is the secret of the success of such out- 
standing social workers among immigrants as 
Rev. E. J. Helms and Willard Shattuck, in Boston, 
Howard Yergin, in New York, and Ralph Cum- 
mins, in Gary, Indiana, Through the Goodwill 
Industries and the Church of All Nations in Bos- 
ton, through the American Parish in New York, 
and through the neighborhood house at Gary, the 
hand of friendship is reaching out to the hundreds 
of thousand of immigrants in those communities.; 
Through these workers and the institutions 
through which they work, all that is best in Amer- 
ica and all that is best in Italy and Hungary and 
Poland and Czecho-Slovakia is being melted to- 
gether in friendship. 

But these workers and all the others of their 
type are few and their total impress upon the 
immigrant problem is small. That problem will 
never be solved in America until each of us be- 
comes his own Americanizer. "We cannot commit 
this task to institutions. All the institutions in 
the country taken together are too small. The 
task is as large as the country itself and only as 
every one does his share — gives his friendship 
and his cooperation— shall we save America and 
the immigrant and our own souls. 



CHAPTER FOUR 

Needs of Town and Country Communities 

Not long ago the seventeen-year-old son of a 
traveling man in the Middle West came home 
half drunk. His mother was prostrated. His 
father was aroused to investigate how it had hap- 
pened. The family lived in a village of about 
1,600 population. There were several pool-rooms 
in connection with cafes which were reputed to 
be " blind tigers.' ' It was in one of these that his 
son had yielded to the temptation to drink in com- 
pany with some other fellows. Now there were 
five Protestant churches in that little town. The 
father immediately laid the blame for his son's 
disgrace not alone to his own share of the respon- 
sibility, but also at the door of these churches. 
Here were five institutions in one small town sup- 
posedly guarding the moral and spiritual welfare 
of that town. If they had been efficient — "on 
their job" — this boy would not have been dis- 
graced. Five churches ought to be able to keep 
one small town clean. 

The father went around and studied these 
churches with the end in view of seeing what could 
be done to make them more efficient. He looked 

73 



74 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

at them from a business man's standpoint. The 
first thing he saw was that altogether they rep- 
resented an investment of $25,000. That was 
about the value of the fine new court house that 
was the pride of the town. If these five churches 
had combined their interests, they could have had 
a plant as large as the court house with room 
enough not only for Sunday service, but for clean 
recreations and all sorts of societies, clubs, and 
leagues through the week. The budget of these 
Hive churches was about $6,000 a year, and on that 
amount they were barely able to pay their cur- 
rent expenses and five ministers a starvation 
wage, each church holding its pastor on only part 
time. If the money could have been spent all in 
one plant, the churches could have paid one good 
minister a fair salary and had enough left over 
to pay the running expenses of the $25,000 build- 
ing. The scheme looked very practical. Why 
couldn't it be put into operation? 

He then began to study the congregations and 
the ministers to find out why. Could it be that 
narrow doctrinal differences were holding men 
apart in this day and generation? No, he found 
it was not that. Not one church member in ten 
could give the distinctive doctrines of his par- 
ticular church nor tell how his church differed 
from his neighbors \ Could it be lack of business 
sense? The best business men in town were in 



TOWN AND COUNTRY COMMUNITIES 75 

the churches and many of them held office. Could 
it be that the ministers were so narrow and selfish 
that they were afiaid that some of them would 
lose their jobs if the churches united? Personal 
acquaintance with the ministers — though he found 
some of them narrow and puny — would not war- 
rant such an explanation. What then was the 
cause? Why couldn't these five churches get to- 
gether and do a big work in cleaning up that town 
instead of struggling along with no higher pur- 
pose than to keep from dying out? 

Here is the explanation at which he at last ar- 
rived. The trouble lay in the small cliques among 
the congregations. Each church was made up 
largely of one or two particular cliques who 
prided themselves that they were the leaders. In 
each one of these cliques there was usually one 
man who was leader. That one man "ran the 
church' ' as the people themselves expressed it. 
He controlled the elders or the governing board 
and if by chance they ever got a minister who 
was too big a man to be bossed, the church got 
rid of him as soon as possible — found him "un- 
desirable" or "unworthy." If two cliques in a 
church should quarrel and one got the upper hand, 
the other would split off and erect another church 
of its own where its leadership would be recog- 
nized. 

Such was the explanation that this traveling 



76 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

man worked out. When he had arrived at it, he 
gave up his plan of church consolidation as hope- 
less until such small cliques could be broken up 
and that seemed an event too far distant to prom- 
ise any help in saving his boy from the evil influ- 
ences of the town. In fact the small cliques could 
not be broken up until the minds of small town 
people were broadened and their hearts enlarged. 

What that business man found in his own vil- 
lage is fairly typical of what has been taking place 
all over America during the last few decades. In 
fact it was better than typical. In many rural 
and village communities the churches are not only 
ineffective, but actually dead and abandoned. For 
thirty years and more country churches in Amer- 
ica have been on the decline. Thousands have 
closed their doors, not because new and better 
churches have taken their place, but because con- 
gregations have dwindled away. 

Did you ever see an abandoned church, its paint 
worn off, its shingles dropping from the roof, its 
pews torn from the floor, its pulpit broken, its 
scraps of carpet rolled into a corner to make a 
bed for some tramp, and up under the eaves the 
nest of an owl whose doleful hoot is the only note 
now heard in the sanctuary? One cannot stand 
in such a place without a picture rising in his 
mind of the congregations — the families, from 
grandfather to grandson — that once worshipped 



TOWN AND COUNTRY COMMUNITIES 77 

there and filled the church with their songs and 
hallowed it with their prayers. 

But that picture is fast becoming a memory. 
Something has happened in the country, some- 
thing not good for human beings nor for their 
houses of worship. Here are some figures for 
one county in Tennessee. The population of the 
county is 8,815. Only 14 per cent of these are 
enrolled as church members. There are twenty- 
six churches in the county, but only eight of them 
have pastors and only three of these give full time 
to the ministry. Five of the eight do not reside in 
the community where they preach. Twenty-two 
of these twenty-six churches have no Sunday- 
school; fifteen of them have no records either of 
finance or of membership. Only two out of the 
twenty-six have gained in membership during the 
past ten years. Only two of the twenty-six have 
male members under twenty-one years of age ; and 
only five have female members under twenty-one 
years of age. In all there are only eight young 
men in the county under twenty-one who belong to 
the church, and only thirty young women. Evi- 
dently, these churches are practically dead; they 
are only walking around to save funeral expenses ! 

The situation becomes worse when we examine 
one community instead of the whole county. 
Here is one village of about 1,000 persons. There 
are three churches, and the total membership of 



78 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

all three is only 120. None of these churches has 
a pastor; none has a Sunday-school; none has reg- 
ular services; none has a financial record; none 
has added or lost in members during the past 
year ; two of them have no members under twenty- 
one years of age; two of them have no church 
buildings. This is an extreme picture and not 
presented here as typical. The point is that the 
general tendency is toward this extreme rather 
than toward efficiency. 

We are told that the foreign mission enterprise 
rests primarily upon the country church and that 
the vitality of city churches depends upon their 
inflow of members from the country. What will 
be the future of our foreign mission enterprises 
and our city churches when the results of this 
decay make themselves apparent? And what pos- 
sible service can the church render to its own com- 
munity when it is in such a condition as is de- 
scribed by these figures? And what must be the 
moral and spiritual condition of the young people 
of the county whose churches have lost their way? 

What has been happening? A great change has 
been taking place throughout country communities 
in America during the past thirty years. The 
price of land has doubled and re-doubled. Old 
families have been selling their farms and mov- 
ing out of the neighborhood. The social life of 
the community has been broken up. The old cus- 



TOWN AND COUNTRY COMMUNITIES 79 

toms have passed away. Tenant farming in cer- 
tain parts of the country has made tremendous 
progress and usually at the expense of the social 
life of the people. Morals have taken the prim- 
rose path, and selfishness and individualism have 
grown like weeds in the hearts and spirits of men. 

Changing population in the country. Steadily, 
unwaveringly, the trend of population in America 
has gone from country to city. It has been noted 
by keen observers for nearly half a century, but 
the last census returns have made everyone see 
that this tendency is a national problem. What 
began in New England forty years ago and re- 
sulted in the decadence of the famous village life 
of that section, has to a greater or less degree 
been repeated in many parts of America. Some 
of the most fertile parts of our nation have de- 
creased in population, and the net result is a loss 
of a quarter of a million in the population of rural 
America in the last census period. Even when 
the incorporated towns of 2,500 inhabitants or less 
are considered, the figures show a gain of but three 
per cent. In the last census period, the city (pop- 
ulation over 2,500) has gained eleven million on 
the country and for the first time becomes the 
predominant portion of our population. 

Effect on the country church. Such movement 
of population affects all community institutions in 
the country — schools, lodges, clubs, and churches. 



80 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

Let us consider here the effect upon the churches, 
with the understanding that similar effects are 
seen in the schools and other institutions as well. 
In Ohio a study of thirty-one counties showed that 
of the 1,515 churches more than two thirds were 
arrested or dying. The same study showed that 
41 per cent of the farms in Ohio are now run by 
tenant farmers but only 22 per cent of the tenant 
farmers are to be found upon the church roll. 
Small churches are the rule in rural America, and 
when the population is shifting and decreasing, 
the churches have less chance to grow. A church 
of less than one hundred members is likely to die. 
Its chance of life is not more than one in three. 
Yet these studies showed that 55 per cent of the 
churches in Ohio are of this small hopeless mem- 
bership of less than seventy-five members each; 
60 per cent of the village and country churches 
have less than 100 members each. One historic 
church, the only one in a township, sixty miles 
from a great metropolitan center, has lost just 
50 per cent of its membership in the last fifty 
years. In an eastern county, one of the best in 
Pennsylvania, one hundred farms were withdrawn 
from production within the last two years. No 
wonder that recent rural surveys, so far as stud- 
ied, have failed to show a single county in which 
as many as half the churches were showing a 
healthy growth. 



TOWN AND COUNTRY COMMUNITIES 81 

The desperate condition of many rural churches. 
Part of the reason for this is the smallness of the 
churches and their feeble program. It is the ex- 
ceptional county that shows more than half its 
country churches having more than seventy-five 
members. Even in as thickly a settled state as 
Pennsylvania, which has the largest rural popu- 
lation of any state, some counties were found with 
as high as 48.5 per cent of the churches having 
twenty-five members or less. Such groups, unless 
they are placed in strategic places in growing 
communities, are self-defeated. In such an audi- 
ence there is small inspiration for the minister. 
There is little hope on the part of the people. 
They have grown content with their poor, dying 
rate of living. They have been soothed by the 
promise of blessing upon the two or three gath- 
ered together. They have forgotten that this 
promise was only for those "agreed as touching 
anything,' ' that is, some real request worthy of 
the Master and for His Kingdom. 

The need of resident ministers. Such small 
groups cannot command a resident minister giv- 
ing his full time to the community. As a result, 
the great majority of country churches in America 
are served by men who come into the community 
but one or two days a month for a preaching serv- 
ice and a Sunday dinner, but for no pastoral or 
community work whatever. One denomination 



82 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

reports that it has 17,000 country churches, but 
that on any Sunday of the year only 5,000 of these 
churches are holding service and the remaining 
12,000 churches are closed. Another denomina- 
tion reports that 90 per cent of its rural churches 
are served by absentee pastors, and three fourths 
of its churches have but one service a month. In 
Ohio 87 per cent of the country ministers are of 
this non-resident, absentee type. For the most 
part they live in towns where they do not preach, 
and preach in the country where they do not live. 
What chance have country ministers of this ab- 
sentee variety to win the friendship of the people 
— especially the young people, and to help them in 
their spiritual struggles. What chance would 
Jesus himself have had of making disciples of 
Peter, James, and John if he had simply met them 
and preached to them one day a month? One 
Eastern town has six churches for 150 people and 
no resident minister. In another Eastern state 
there are thirty-six churches within a radius of six 
miles, while adjoining townships are almost un- 
cared for and more than 1,000 children of school 
age have no formal religious instruction what- 
ever. 

The failure of the circuit system. The lack of 
resident ministers and the circuit system which 
accompanies the lack have utterly failed to effect 
the spiritual salvation, to accomplish which is the 




KwSlliillli 



FOUR CHURCHES IN A ROW, ALL OF THEM WITH MINISTERS ON PART 
TIME A WASTEFUL AND SINFUL DUPLICATION 



A MODERN RURAL CHURCH PLANT AT MT. AIRY, MARYLAND 



TOWN AND COUNTRY COMMUNITIES 83 

Church's reason for existence. In 1916 one county 
of 30,000 souls showed a decreasing church mem- 
bership and one abandoned church. Four years 
later the same county was surveyed and showed 
a loss of nearly 1,000 in rural church membership 
and thirteen abandoned churches. In one com- 
munity of 775 people there are seven abandoned 
churches. If seven different denominations, each 
maintaining a church in this town as one point of 
a circuit, have failed, is it not reasonable to 
suppose that one church in such a place might 
succeed? 

These churches died because the people, feeling 
that, in the fractional ministry of one service or 
two a month, the church showed a lack of interest 
in them, reciprocated by taking little interest in 
the church. To survive, the churches emphasized 
differences, and in seeking to save their lives, they 
lost them. Not in minor differences, in losing life 
for the Kingdom's good, but in emphasizing first 
agreements, in seeking first the Kingdom of God, 
lies the solution of this and other problems of the 
country church. 

It is easy to understand how results like this 
can arise from an abuse of the circuit system when 
we study it still further. Consider for instance 
the waste in travel. Here are a few figures taken 
at random. Eev. Mr. A travels 700 miles to 
preach at one church twice a month. Eev. Mr. B 



84 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

goes 416 miles a month to serve his two churches. 
Eev. Mr. C has three churches and travels only 
396 miles, while with the same number Eev. Mr. D 
traverses only 175 miles. Three of these pastors 
pass through a town, two of them changing cars 
there, that has no religious ministration at all. 
The cost of all this useless travel would go a long 
way toward raising salaries and allowing one of 
these circuit riders to minister to the people at 
the neglected junction point. 

There are scores of instances like the following, 
which vary only in mileage. In one state a certain 
minister living in A, once a month travels 250 
miles to conduct a service at B for a handful of 
people. The same day another minister sets forth 
from B to preach to another handful 250 miles 
away at A. We might well echo the words of 
Nicodemus, "How can such things be," or those 
of a twentieth-century layman who said, "Why 
don't both you men stay at home and mind your 
business V 9 

With ministers traveling distances like these, 
thousands of churches are perforce closed every 
Sunday, thousands have no Sunday-school, and 
where one does exist, the minister has time to at- 
tend only about half its sessions, if the school is 
but one point of a circuit. 

Wasted effort. From these facts it is clearly 
to be seen that there must be a great amount of 



TOWN AND COUNTRY COMMUNITIES 85 

overlapping of effort. This is too true. A town 
has started, and a church, denomination A, is 
begun. Denomination B also enters the field trust- 
ing that the community will grow. Of course, 
there are still too few to support a resident pas- 
tor, so the congregation is put on a circuit. It 
has, however, its own building. Other denomina- 
tions follow. Note some of the results. We find 
one town of 150 people with six churches. In an 
Oklahoma town of 3,500 there are fourteen 
churches of as many denominations, but only one 
full-time pastor. A Texas town officially laid 
claim to "the distinction" of having more 
churches than any other town of its size in the 
state — ten there are for 1,233 people. A Califor- 
nia town of 1,600 people has fourteen churches, 
all but one receiving " missionary" money. None 
of the churches is flourishing, and each feels that 
some of the others ought to give way. A leading 
citizen ventured the opinion that some at least 
must be right. 

Lost leadership. Situations like this are not 
unusual; they are, alas, typical. They result, 
moreover, in a type of work that means actually 
neglecting a territory, for a church on a circuit, 
with a non-resident pastor, does not stretch out 
far from its home base. Its impact upon the com- 
munity is slight. For instance, in one section of 
a county so fertile that the yield per acre of 



86 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

oats is more than one hundred bushels, with other 
crops in proportion, there are seven churches with 
a total membership of 246. There are no resident 
pastors, and there are 1,000 people in that section 
of the county, prosperous as any farmers in Amer- 
ica, outside the ministration of the church. The 
mission money drawn by these seven churches 
would finance a resident, full-time minister who 
could win this section for the Kingdom of God. 

In another county there was but one resident 
pastor in the entire third of the county that lay 
to the southwest. There were, however, twenty 
churches, eight of them abandoned. The one resi- 
dent pastor lived in a township of 2,100 people in 
which there were 134 church members. Some of 
the non-resident ministers traveled through a com- 
munity of 500 people in which there had been no 
church services for ten years. This was in a 
populous east-central county. Conditions were 
recognized;, but with the constant pressure tof 
keeping alive scattered groups of denomination- 
alists, there was no strength or time for work for 
the Kingdom of God in such needy fields. 

No program of service to meet changed condi- 
tions. The greatest tragedy in the whole situa- 
tion is the lack of a definite program, even where 
the churches are large enough. Churches with 
more than 100 members under twenty-one years of 
age and with over 500 in their Sunday-school, have 



TOWN AND COUNTRY COMMUNITIES 87 

been found that do not have any provision for the 
social needs of their members. "The future of 
this church lies with the young people, ' ' writes a 
pastor, 60 per cent of whose people are twenty-one 
years of age or less. Yet here, too, there is no 
young people 's society, no leadership training, no 
socials, not even an annual picnic. 

In spite of all the changes that have taken place 
in the country during the past thirty years, the 
country church program has not changed. It still 
consists of a few hymns and a sermon and a col- 
lection one or two days a month. That program 
met a very definite need in the pioneer days of 
this country when the minister was the only edu- 
cated man, and the community was made up of a 
fairly settled population which had inherited from 
its fathers a strong religious tradition. But the 
rural population today has no such heritage, 
neither is it a settled population. The social life 
of the community has also completely changed 
with the introduction of automobiles, rural mail 
delivery, and telephones. The farmer's spiritual 
struggle is harder than ever before. He must save 
his soul from narrowness and littleness, from 
commercialism and greed, from all the dark 
powers that breed in loneliness and social and 
moral stagnation. The great majority of country 
churches have still to develop programs of service 
that will give adequate help in this struggle. 



88 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

Moral decline in the country. The decline of 
the country church has been followed by an inevi- 
table decline in morality. In his book, Six Thou- 
sand Country Churches, Rev. C. 0. Gill shows the 
illiteracy, illegitimacy, crime, and physical de- 
generacy that have followed in the trail of the 
declining churches. He shows also that when 
such established Protestant churches as the Meth- 
odist, Presbyterian, and Baptist close their doors, 
sane religious worship and expression is followed 
by a degenerate type of religion that spends itself 
in emotionalism and ecstasy. Suppose this de- 
cline should continue, and the churches which are 
founded on intelligent faith should be supplanted 
by the Holy Rollers, Godites, and similar bodies, 
what would be the effect upon the lives of the 
boys and girls of the next generation? 

Better training for ministers. The need for 
strong ministers in the city is so great that it 
has become increasingly rare for college and sem- 
inary trained men to stay in a rural pastorate 
unless they have a vision for the work and a 
supreme consecration to the rural task. Two 
large denominations report that only 10 per cent 
of their rural pastors have had college and semi- 
nary training. In a study of the rural ministers 
made in seventeen counties in one state, it was 
found that only 6 per cent had received college and 
seminary training. This ratio is perhaps just a 



TOWN AND COUNTRY COMMUNITIES 89 

little below the average. Much as this is to be re- 
gretted, the conditions are largely to blame. As 
long as American Christianity permits the sur- 
vival of small, separatist groups, maintaining re- 
ligious societies for the sake of denominational 
satisfaction, so long men looking for a real King- 
dom task will turn elsewhere, and so long there 
will be a dearth of the type of leadership needed 
in the religious life of rural America. 

Of course, no situation like this arises quickly. 
It is rooted in the past, in those times when the 
heroic circuit rider rode from settlement to set- 
tlement to bring the message, "Thus saith the 
Lord." Those times are past, however. The 
trails of the forest have become highways of traf- 
fic. The forests have become fertile fields. The 
settlement has become a town. New occasions 
teach new duties, but the Church has yet to learn 
in almost every part of rural America that the 
circuit system is a relic of the pioneer days and 
just as efficient for the present day needs of coun- 
try people as a flail would be for threshing our 
gigantic wheat crops. 

The country minister's financial struggle. The 
country minister has a great financial struggle. 
The time he is able to give to any one congrega- 
tion does not warrant a large stipend, and even 
the total from three, six, or ten preaching points 
does not bulk very large. It is the exceptional 



90 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

country minister who has to pay an income tax. 
Indeed it is the exceptional one who receives more 
than $2,000 a year, including the value of his par- 
sonage. The average is less than $1,000. There 
is no money for books, for attendance at confer- 
ences, — and these things are the minister's tools. 
There is scarcely enough money for proper food 
and clothing. Hence, we find that country min- 
isters are, in large numbers, engaged in other oc- 
cupations to make ends meet. They farm, teach, 
clerk, trade horses, work as printers on the coun- 
try weekly, sell automobiles, and raise rabbits. 
This further mars their effective work in their 
churches and reduces already meager pastoral 
work to the vanishing point. 

The whole situation is intolerable. The time 
must come when communities will find agreements 
outweighing differences, when they will combine 
so that they can give a resident, trained minister 
a real field and pay him a living wage. 

What is to be done about it? Begin with your 
own church. If you live in a large city, the best 
way to lend a hand to those who live and work in 
the country is to give them your sympathetic in- 
terest and to contribute as you are able through 
the benevolent offerings to the country church de- 
partment of the Board of Home Missions of your 
denomination. 

But if you live in a small town or country, you 



TOWN AND COUNTRY COMMUNITIES 91 

have an immediate and direct opportunity for 
service. First, find out what the greatest human 
needs in your neighborhood are. What are the 
factors that are keeping men from God? Then 
find out what, if anything, your church is doing to 
meet those needs, to remove those limiting fac- 
tors. For this purpose you may find useful the 
following score card, prepared by the Town and 
Country Division of the Interchurch Survey. 
Bear in mind that this score card sets a minimum, 
not a maximum, standard of efficiency. If your 
church cannot answer each of the thirty-one points 
with an unqualified "yes," you are just so far 
from being prepared to do your task as a church. 

Measure your Church by this Standard 

I. Pastor 

1. Church has a resident pastor living 

within the bounds of this commu- 
nity. 

2. Pastor devotes his full time to the 

work of this community. 
II. Parish 

3. Church works systematically to ex- 

tend its parish to the limits of the 
community. 

4. Church works systematically to serve 

all occupational classes in the com- 
munity and all racial elements 
which do not have their own Prot- 
estant churches. 



92 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

HE. Physical Equipment 

5. A church building with an audito- 

rium having a seating capacity- 
adequate to the maximum attend- 
ance at regular service, and 
equipped with organ or piano. 

6. Space other than church auditorium 

for social and recreational pur- 
poses. 

7. Separate rooms or curtained spaces 

for Sunday-school classes or de- 
partments. 

8. A stereopticon or motion-picture 

projection facilities. 

9. A well-equipped kitchen. 

10. Comfortable, attractive parsonage 

with modern improvements. 

11. Adequate sanitary toilets on the 

church property. 

12. Horsesheds or adequate parking 

space for automobiles. 

13. All property kept in good repair and 

in sightly condition. 
IV. Religious Education 

14. Sunday-school maintained through- 

out the year. 

15. Sunday-school enrollment at least 

equal to church membership. 

16. Definite and regular attempt made to 

bring pupils into church member- 
ship, and the offering of specific 
instruction in preparation there- 
for. 



TOWN AND COUNTRY COMMUNITIES 93 

17. Provision for teacher-training or 

normal class. 

18. Definite provision for training of 

leaders for church and community 
work. 
V. Finance 

19. The church budget, including both 

local expenses and benevolences, 
adopted annually. 

20. Every Member Canvass made annu- 

ally on the basis of the local and 
benevolent budget adopted. 

21. The budget for benevolence at least 

25 per cent as large as the regular 
current expense budget. 

22. The pastor receiving a total salary 

of at least $1,200 a year and house, 
with an annual increase up to at 
least $1,800 and house within five 
years. 
VI. Program 

23. A definite program of work adopted 

annually by the officers and con- 
gregation. 

24. A definite assumption of responsi- 

bility with respect to some part of 
the program by at least 25 per cent 
of the active members. 

25. Public worship every Sunday. 

26. Systematic evangelism aimed to 

reach the entire community and 
every class in the community. 



94 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

27. Cooperation with church boards and 

denominational agencies of world- 
wide missions. 

28. Community service a definite part of 

the church's work, including a con- 
tinuous and cumulative study of 
the social, moral, and economic 
forces of the community, and a 
definite program of community co- 
operation led or participated in by 
the church. 

29. Cooperation with the other churches 

of the community, if any. 

30. Definite organized activities for the 

various age and sex groups in the 
congregation and community (as 
Young People's Society, Men's 
Brotherhood, Boy Scouts, or sim- 
ilar efforts). 

31. A systematic and cumulative survey 

of the parish with a view to deter- 
mining the church relationships 
and religious needs of every fam- 
ily, and such a mapping of the par- 
ish as will show the relationship of 
each family to local religious insti- 
tutions. 

Number of points answered in un- 
qualified affirmative. 

Number of points answered partially 
in affirmative. 

Number of points answered in nega- 
tive. 



TOWN AND COUNTRY COMMUNITIES 95 

It is your task. The business of making town 
and country churches efficient is the task of the 
younger generation. Not because you are wiser 
than your fathers, but because you are less bound 
by the traditions of the past. The school in which 
your fathers were trained prepared them in the 
methods and programs that are now outworn. 
The old order must give place to the new. Can 
you succeed where the last generation has failed? 
Can you take hold of this moral and spiritual 
chaos and work upon it, bring the spirit of God 
to move upon it, until light comes out of darkness, 
growth comes out of stagnation, order comes out 
of disorder, and beauty out of the mire? Can you 
revive the institutions of the country so that they 
will actually help men and women and children 
to live as God wants them to live? 

A call for a new leadership. Eural problems have 
become so difficult, and the menace of moral and 
spiritual decline so threatening that men of the 
largest caliber and broadest training are needed 
if the tide is to be turned. Churches, schools, and 
other rural institutions must have a new leader- 
ship. They must have young men and women who 
have the vision and the courage and the aggres- 
siveness to break with the traditions that now gov- 
ern country institutions. They must be the sort 
of young men and women who "grow frequent 
crops of new ideas and are not afraid to winnow 



96 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

them with the flail of practical experiment." 

President Kenyon L. Butterfield has sounded a 
ringing call for such leadership : 

"The country-side is calling, calling for men. 
Vexing problems of labor and of life disturb our 
minds in country as in city. . . . Social institu- 
tions have developed to meet these new issues. 
But the great need of the present is leadership. 
Only men can vitalize institutions. We need lead- 
ers among the farmers themselves, we need lead- 
ers in education, leaders in organization and co- 
operation. . . . 

"She (the Church) wants trained men, who 
come to their work with knowledge and with 
power, who have hammered out a plan for an ac- 
tive campaign for the rural church. 

"She wants men with enthusiasms, whose en- 
ergy can withstand the frosts of sloth, of habit, of 
pettiness, of envy, of backbiting, and whose spirit 
is not quenched by the waters of adversity, of un- 
realized hopes, of tottering schemes. 

"She wants persistent men, who will stand by 
their task amid the mysterious calls from undis- 
covered lands, the siren voices of ambition and 
ease, the withering storms of winters of discon- 
tent. 

"She wants constructive men, who can trans- 
mute visions into wood and^ stone, dreams into live 
institutions, hopes into fruitage. 

"She wants heroic men, men who possess a 
'tart, cathartic virtue,' men who love adventure 
and difficulty, men who can work alone with God 
and suffer no sense of loneliness." 



CHAPTER FIVE 
Other Unfinished Tasks 

Among the Southern Mountains. Some 3,000,000 
pure Anglo-Saxon Americans are living among 
the mountains of Missouri, Arkansas, North and 
South Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ten- 
nessee, Georgia, and Alabama. It has been a fa- 
vorite indoor sport of many tourists and novelists 
to hold up the ways of some of these mountaineers 
to laughter. Judging from the usual stories one 
hears about them, these 3,000,000 people are igno- 
rant and depraved and spend their time making 
moonshine whisky and in shooting each other. 

But quite a different picture is drawn by the 
teachers and missionaries who have been work- 
ing among them. They admit that there are a few 
of the depraved variety, but point to the fact that 
New York and Chicago and San Francisco also 
have depraved citizens who make illicit whisky 
and occasionally exhibit homicidal tendencies. 
The great majority of Southern Mountaineers are 
not of this depraved type. They are farmers and 
lumbermen doing their best to earn an honest liv- 
ing from the land. The obstacles they have to 
overcome are great. The steepness of the moun- 

97 



98 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

tainside and the unproductiveness of the soil have 
made mere existence a struggle. Many of their 
children are under-fed and many have lost out in 
the race for life. Their poverty is such that they 
are unable to afford high-grade schools, and illit- 
eracy has resulted. They have almost no railroads 
and very few good roads. Add to these handicaps 
the lack of proper medical care and of an educated 
ministry, and you have some idea of the obsta- 
cles the mountaineers must overcome in their 
struggle for life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap- 
piness. 

But in spite of these handicaps, the people have 
developed a fearlessness and a persistence that 
have made them an asset to America. Abraham 
Lincoln came from this stock. During the Great 
War the boys of these Southern Mountains volun- 
teered so willingly and so quickly that when the 
draft came whole counties had no young men to 
give. Alvin York, the private most signally hon- 
ored by the United States at the close of the war, 
was a lad of the Southern Mountains. 

The teachers and missionaries who go into these 
mountains do not go in the spirit of converting 
the heathen, but rather in the spirit of sharing ad- 
vantages of the outside world and receiving in 
return the inspiration of the mountain people 
themselves. The mission workers endeavor to 
build up among the people a community spirit and, 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 99 

by cooperation of the United States Department 
of Agriculture, to help them secure better crops 
from their farms. Nurses tend the sick and teach 
mothers how to take better care of their babies. 

The mission boarding-school shows mountain 
boys and girls how to keep house, how to garden, 
and how to farm. At least one denomination 
trains more specifically for homemaking by plac- 
ing a group of girls in a practise cottage. Here 
the entire management is given to the girls them- 
selves, who are required to keep within a certain 
budget. In like manner the boys are taught prac- 
tical farm and trade work by actually working on 
a farm or at a trade while at the boarding-school. 

The following story of the experiences of an 
enthusiastic and consecrated young man will give 
a better picture of the life of the people, than 
many pages of statistics and abstract statements : 

"My first call was to take care of a baby with a 
case of ' teeth.' So through the summer my medi- 
cal work included people suffering with ' whisky 
nerves' and stomachs, sick babies, tubercular 
prospects and victims, one opium fiend, child- 
births, colds, fevers, and especially the fight 
against worms. 

"When an animal cuts itself or is badly hurt, 
the men at Vardy have a habit of calling on the 
preacher. 

1 i Caring for the weak in mind has been very in- 
teresting to me. One I sent away for special 



100 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

treatment; to another I gave organ lessons, and 
others I merely examined. 

"Do not think that I claim to be a doctor, but, 
if one is situated where the only M.D. is thirteen 
miles away, he will make the most of two years 
of medical training. 

"This summer I also repaired several engines 
and farm machines. Lining up fences, measuring 
for roofing, surveying roads, and puttying win- 
dows were incidental jobs. 

"We have a one-room tumble-down school 
taught by one who should take up more grammar 
school work. After doing our best, we raised $425 
toward a good eight months' school. I told of the 
real schools and their benefits, compared them 
with the schools of this community, showed them 
how they were losing money and good brains un- 
der the present system. If this campaign is kept 
up, we shall make an ideal grammar school center 
here. 

"In twenty years we must have a hospital, 
school, playground, electric light system, printing 
press, canning factory, corn, saw, and wheat mills, 
a stone crusher, good roads, and several other 
necessities. We are awakening.' ' 

After discussing the needs for better agricul- 
ture, roads, recreations, and so on, and his efforts 
to secure their benefits for his people, he pro- 
ceeded: 

"At ten o'clock one night, I was called to care 
for a dying baby. I went up and found cholera 
symptoms. We worked all night to keep the baby 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 101 

alive and by noon of the next day it was safe. 
Cause of sickness — an overheated mother nursed 
the baby. It became sick, and they had given it 
an overdose of paregoric. 

"The next week I collected bottles of 'baby 
dope'; caught a trap full of flies, borrowed milk 
pans, bottles, and nipples, and used them just as 
I found them at a demonstration meeting. The 
meeting was a success. 

"For the remainder of the summer we used the 
question and answer method in discussing 'Our 
Community More Beautiful, Healthful, Joyful, 
Fruitful, and Prayerful.' Questions were as- 
signed a week ahead of time. Each adjective sup- 
plied a subject. All were based on Christ's word 
concerning a more abundant life, stewardship, la- 
borers, and so forth. I gave fifteen minutes to 
suggesting some things that could be done at 
once. As a result several lawns have been 
cleaned, houses are renovated, two new houses are 
planned to take the place of cabins, spitting in 
the church is a thing condemned, and many barn 
improvements are accomplished. 

"This place can be the chosen of these hills and 
lead the people if she is given the chance, but we 
need a leader who can be here year after year for 
five, ten, fifteen years : a leader trusted in business, 
respected in judgment, loved in friendship, a fol- 
lower of Christ. We need that leader now. It 
was terrible to leave those people just when they 
wished to do things. 

"Their whole thought has been, 'How shall we 
begin? Who will lead us?' " 



102 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

That student answered his own call and is today 
at work in that community. But there are hun- 
dreds of other communities in the Southern Moun- 
tains with no one to serve them, and day by day 
young people as well as old are spiritually starv- 
ing because no human being extends a helping 
hand or opens an understanding heart. 

Among the Indians. In a private burial ground 
on the North Shore of Long Island is a monument 
to a gallant colonial captain. He was a great In- 
dian fighter in his day. The bas-relief on one side 
of the shaft represents him on horseback, armed, 
ruthlessly treading down the redskins — men, 
women, and children. In the bas-relief on the 
opposite side his hands are outstretched to them 
and the motto reads, "Love One Another." The 
satire is unconscious, but quite too perfectly it in- 
dicates what our main policy towards the Red 
Men has been. We sold them fire water. Next, 
we took away their land. Then we crowded them 
on to reservations. And now we are trying to con- 
vert them to our religion. Is it any wonder that 
they regard us with suspicion? 

It is easy to be sentimental about the Indian at 
a distance of time and space — to revel in Hiawa- 
tha's physical fitness and religious yearnings — to 
admire the fine dignity of the familiar profile on 
our least of coins, — to become enthusiastic about 
the beadwork, the baskets, the ofttimes truly 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 103 

beautiful rugs the women weave — to thrill with 
sympathetic sadness before Fraser's "The End 
of the Trail" and other like works of art, — to 
glory in the fact that of 9,000 Indian young men 
who served in the war, 6,000 volunteered. 

But sentimentalizing doesn't help the Indian, 
and it is help that he needs. There is an idea 
abroad that the Indians are a vanishing race, but 
the idea is contrary to the facts. They are in- 
creasing both in numbers and in needs. In North 
and South and Central America there are today 
about 12,000,000 Indians, and in this country alone 
there are 334,000. Of the latter 214,000 cannot 
speak English, only 79,000 are citizens, and only 
26,000 are voters. But their greatest needs are 
not simply the learning of our language and a 
greater share in our government. They need most 
of all health, education, native leadership, and 
the understanding cooperation of the white race. 

Their physical vigor is gone, and for that fact 
the white man must bear a share of the responsi- 
bility. We have chosen unpromising land for 
their reservations. We have packed them into 
close rooms. We have given them strange food. 
We have taken from them the joys and the exer- 
cise of the hunt and the chase. Tuberculosis, 
previously unknown to them, has become a 
scourge. Altogether too many of them are dirty 
and lazy and stolid. 



104 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

But of late years a worse scourge than tuber- 
culosis has afflicted them. It is the eating of pey- 
ote, or mescal. This is a very powerful drug 
obtained from Mexico in the form of bean pods. 
This bean produces a peculiar form of intoxica- 
tion. 

"There is muscular depression, sometimes so 
much so that the subject is hardly conscious of 
having arms and legs. Time is lengthened; a min- 
ute is like an hour, and an hour is like a whole 
night. Things seem far away. Common sounds 
seem wonderful so that one note struck on the 
piano seems like a whole chord. Each note pro- 
duces a new series of wonderful colors. Clothed 
in these kaleidoscopic colors all kinds of animals 
and objects are seen, some beautiful and alluring, 
and some grotesque and fearful. But it is the 
colors constantly coming and going that make the 
most fascinating and satisfying appeal." 1 

Peyote was first used as a medicine, but because 
of the dreamy, happy feeling it induced, which the 
Indians interpreted as nearness to God, its use 
rapidly spread and became a sort of religious cult 
in spite of the fact that many investigators and 
scientists of high standing pronounced its effects 
"evil and only evil." 

Dr. Bruce Kinney in the Christian Work tells 
how, under the guise of being a necessary religious 
rite, the use of this drug has now become a com- 

1 Peyote or Mescal, by Rev. Henry Vruwink, Women's Board of 
Domestic Missions, Reformed Church in America. 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 105 

mercialized vice of alarming proportions among 
the Indians : 

"The formal ceremony usually begins on Satur- 
day night and there is great feasting in connec- 
tion with it — and what Indian can resist a feast ! 
The ceremonies follow the feast and include the 
partaking of peyote. Sleep follows, and the par- 
ticipants are in a stupor most of or all of Sunday, 
in proportion to the amount of the stuff that they 
have taken and the resistance their systems offer 
to its effects. In extreme cases it is days or weeks 
before the victims entirely recover their normal 
condition of body and mind. 

"Some of the priests are ' returned students/ 
and in Christian communities they claim that the 
Indian's religious road differs from that of the 
white man and that peyote is the Indian road; 
that peyote is the Indian's way of knowing God 
and seeing Christ ; that peyote is the Indian way 
of observing communion and learning God's will 
for him. 

"At some of these services prayers are offered 
to God and Christ, testimonies and exhortations 
are given, and the Bible is read and occupies a 
prominent place on the altar. 

"Frequent attempts have been made to secure 
the passage of laws by Congress which would pro- 
hibit the importation and sale of this dangerous 
drug. Every time this attempt has been made, 
the Indians with their hired white attorneys have 
hurried to Washington to protest ; and up to date 
their protests have been influential and all unfa- 
vorable legislation has been defeated. 



106 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

"It is high time that our people became aroused 
and passed laws to prevent the spread of this 
habit. Such laws are needed not alone to preserve 
the physical, mental, and moral integrity of the 
Indians, but that of our own people also. An in- 
sidious and dangerous drug like this knows no 
racial barrier. In these days when whisky is be- 
coming harder to get, more expensive, and more 
dangerous, young white men of the 'baser sort' 
are beginning to take this 'dry whisky,' and if 
something cannot be done soon, we shall have a 
gigantic problem on our hands to keep our young 
men from being debauched.' ' 

Eev. Henry Vruwink cites the testimony of 
many Indians who have used this drug, and they 
all agree that the bad effects are moral as well as 
physical. Chatasy, a Comanche, testified, "When 
I was a peyote eater, I was a big liar; nobody 
would trust me. I was not a safe person to go 
with women folks." 

Nawats, a strong Comanche chief, who knows 
from his own experience the nature of the drug, 
tells of its inroads upon his tribe: 

"I cannot tell you how many of our people have 
had their minds affected through the use of peyote, 
but many have. Many of our young people are 
ignorantly using peyote; they will find out that it 
will ruin their minds and destroy their bodies. 
Most of our leading men died from eating peyote." 

The conclusion of the whole matter is that 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 107 

peyote, or mescal, has become the greatest danger 
to the Indians of the plains. Unless they are pro- 
tected, it will blight them physically and morally 
and will have like effect upon white men. 

As for education, the government and churches 
together have rendered a great service to the In- 
dians, but much remains to be done. The govern- 
ment has more than 300 Indian schools, the Roman 
Catholics 47 mission schools, and the Protestants 
25 mission schools; but the total mission school 
enrollment is not more than 5,000, and the public 
and private school enrollment is only about 30,000. 
Many Indian children are not in school at all. At 
least 7,000 among the Navajos have no opportuni- 
ties for schooling. More schools are needed, 
therefore. More important than the school build- 
ing, however, is the school curriculum and more 
important than the curriculum is the teacher. 

All teaching, industrial and religious, must 
take account of the fact that the Indians are a 
primitive people whose thinking is concrete and 
not abstract. They are individualistic with prac- 
tically no conception of organized life. Since 
their greatest economic need is to adapt them- 
selves to modern methods of agriculture and other 
industries of civilized life, their education should 
be shaped to this end, and their teachers must be 
of the variety that is able to teach them how to 
make two blades of grass grow where only one 



108 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

grew before. Vocational training is essential for 
the teacher of Indians, but more essential is high 
Christian character and a desire to give friendship 
along with instruction. 

And that brings us to the greatest need of the 
Indian now — an understanding cooperation on the 
part of the white men. It is essentially a spiritual 
need. Bishop Hugh L. Burleson, who has given 
his life, as did his father before him, to the In- 
dians of South Dakota, pleads for a recognition of 
the finer attributes of the Indian — his religious 
nature, his keen perception of spiritual values, 
his ambition to do and to accomplish, and his 
ability to stand fast. Bishop Burleson cites this 
illustration of Anglo-Saxon misunderstanding: 

" An instance of our interpretation of his names 
will point a moral. A Chippewa chief lies buried 
on a reservation in Minnesota, and the stone over 
his grave bears the name ' Hole-in- the-Day.' Silly, 
absolutely silly! Again the misunderstanding 
white man. 'Hole-in-the-Day' was the son of a 
young Chippewa chief who started on the warpath 
against my people, the Dakotas. He had been 
married but a few months to his bride, and he 
wished to make a splendid record as a leader. It 
was the first time he had led the war party, and 
he led with courage and strategy, but adventured 
himself so bravely that the whole party came back 
victorious, but brought their dead chief with them. 
Shortly afterward the son was born, and his 
mourning mother called him, 'Rift-in-the-Cloud.' 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 109 

It is a picture-name, A long dark day of cloud 
and rain and shadow and sobbing trees ; then, just 
as the sun sets, its rays break through a rift in the 
cloud and shine out across the plain. The little 
lad was a rift in the cloud of her sorrow, and we 
called him 'Hole-in-the-Day.' And when he was 
dead, we put a two-ton monument on him and 
wrote 'Hole-in-the-Day' on that." 

It is self-evident that progress in civilization 
must be based on mutual understanding, and that 
we will not succeed in saving the Indian or redeem- 
ing our own past until we have eyes to see and 
heart to appreciate those things in the Indian soul 
that are true and beautiful and good. 

Alaska. Everyone who has read Robert W. 
Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee" or 
"The Spell of the Yukon" knows already the 
spirit of Alaska. It is a spirit of adventure, of 
great risks, and of dramatic struggle against ele- 
mental forces. 

The United States probably never made a better 
financial investment than when it purchased 
Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7,200,000. The 
man whose faith and persistence were responsible 
for this venture was William H. Seward, Secre- 
tary of State. He suffered the usual fate of the 
man of vision who is misunderstood by his fellows. 
The next paragraph of the record begins with the 
words "But they said." In this instance, They 
were the great host of political opponents and 



110 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

reactionaries who dubbed Alaska "Seward's 
Folly," "Uncle Sam's Ice Box/' "America's Ice- 
berg Farm," and so on. But on his death-bed 
Seward declared that the act of his administra- 
tion that would live the longest would be the 
purchase of Alaska, That prophecy has come 
true. Already the territory has yielded more than 
a billion dollars' worth of natural resources and 
has paid for itself more than a dozen times over. 
But it is not the history of Alaska, or its natural 
resources, in which we are especially interested 
here. Rather it is the human beings living there. 
There are somej 54,000, approximately half of 
them white and half of them native. The natives 
are divided between Eskimos and Indians. The 
white man's record in Alaska, and especially the 
record of the white man who has gone to Alaska 
in search of fortune, is romantic in poetry, but in 
actual practise it has been little less than shame- 
ful. The adventurers who sought their fortune in 
Alaska left behind them a trail of vice, drunken- 
ness, and disease that is a black spot upon Amer- 
ica's history. That trail would be bad enough if 
it were a thing of the past, but it is a living thing. 
It is living in the blood of the natives and shows 
itself in feeble-minded children, in blindness and 
loathsome sores. America must blot out that 
trail. "We should Be ashamed of our flag if we 
allowed a trail like that to live under its folds. 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 111 

We turn from that trail to the brighter record 
that Christian men and women have made in 
Alaska in bringing to the natives schools, hospi- 
tals, and churches. Forty years ago most of the 
natives were pagans, with no medical care except 
what they had from their primitive medicine-men. 
But during these last forty years, consecrated 
teachers and doctors and ministers, as filled with 
the spirit of adventure as the gold seekers, and 
with as much courage or more, have been estab- 
lishing schools and hospitals and churches all the 
way from Metlakahtla to Point Barrow, the most 
northerly mission station in the world. These in- 
stitutions have, for the most part, been estab- 
lished by churches, but the churches have turned 
over some of their schools and hospitals to the 
federal government as soon as the government was 
prepared to care for them. Many of these insti- 
tutions, however, are still in charge of mission- 
aries and probably will be for years to come. 
Slowly but surely these consecrated men and 
women are putting to rout the devils of ignorance 
and superstition. The old custom of selling 
young girls in marriage is giving way before the 
Christian conception of womanhood. The old law 
of "an eye for an eye" is being supplanted by 
justice seasoned with mercy. 

Here is a story of one native who exemplifies 
in his own life what is taking place in the life of 



112 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

the Alaskan natives. It is the story of Joe Soko- 
nik. Joe lives in the village of Kivalina, which 
is on the coast between Cape Prince of Wales and 
Point Hope. It is like most Alaskan villages, with 
its sod houses, its Eskimo dogs, and its cheerful 
little people with their smiles and hearty welcome. 
At the door of the government schoolhouse sits 
Joe Sokonik on a wooden sled. Day in and day 
out he is always to be found on that sled. He is 
unable to move his body, and has the use of his 
hands and head only. 

When a boy, Joe injured his spine in a dreadful 
accident on the ice. There was no available med- 
ical attention. When the government teacher, Mr. 
Maguire, found him, he was lying in a tent, aban- 
doned by all but a faithful sister. His shoulder 
was perforated with terrible ulcers, and he was 
emaciated, weak, and filthy. Even good white peo- 
ple who saw him felt that his case was hopeless. 
But Mr. Maguire is one of those who believes that 
"inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the 
least of these my brethren ye have done it unto 
me. n He took Joe into his own home, nursed 
him back to health, cared for his dreadful sores, 
taught him to read, told him of a Saviour 's love, 
and finally had the supreme joy of introducing 
him to the Bureau of Education as a fit man to 
undertake the education of the children of his own 
people. 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 113 

Today, Joe is not only teacher of the school, but 
is truly the friend of the whole community of na- 
tives. To him they bring their problems and ques- 
tions. He is "chief" of Kivalina, not because of 
tribal descent, but through sheer worth of char- 
acter and his attainments. His rude sled has been 
transformed. True, it is his seat by day and his 
bed at night, for he never leaves it, but it is in 
fact a royal throne and is occupied by a king who 
reigns well, having qualified in the school of suf- 
fering, of indomitable will, and high purpose, — a 
member of the Eoyal Family. 

Alaska's great need now is for men and women 
of the spirit of Mr. Maguire to bring to these 
brave and cheerful people the best that America 
has in education, health, and friendship. 

In Porto Rico and Cuba. The outstanding need 
in Porto Eico and Cuba is a free church. Cuba 
needs also a free school. Porto Rico is under the 
American flag, Cuba is a sister republic, but both 
are under the domination of the Catholic church 
and centuries of ignorance and misrule. Father 
Vaughn is said to have rejoiced in the ignorance 
of the peasants of Spain, who, by their illiteracy 
and poverty, were rendered immune to the dan- 
gers of modernism. The priesthood that has ruled 
Cuba and Porto Eico has had similar grounds for 
rejoicing, for the great masses of the people are 
illiterate, and their poverty beggars description. 



114 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

Their ignorance and poverty, together with the 
fear by which they have been ruled, have kept 
them in continual moral and spiritual slavery 
and in an economic state that is only one degree 
removed from bondage. 

The greatest service that America can render 
to the three million Latin Americans is to give 
them a true understanding of the real nature of 
Christianity, to free their life from fear, to teach 
them the gospel of the indwelling God. Even be- 
fore we do this, we must follow the example of 
Jesus and relieve their physical distress. To these 
ends the Protestant denominations are establish- 
ing hospitals, schools, and churches in both of 
these countries. Almost daily there come to the 
mission board secretaries ' desks communications 
to this effect: "Have you found us that medical 
missionary for X — in Cuba? "We must have him 
at once." "Here in Porto Eico three hundred 
students are meeting in an old barn and calling it 
a university. Do help us to get funds to build a 
real building. The students will contribute all the 
manual labor if we can just supply the materials. ' ' 
"The hospital in San Juan must have a new nurse 
at once. You don't realize how overworked the 
present nurses are." 

"Where shall we find the young men and women 
to answer these calls and to help Cubans and 
Porto Ricans in their physical battles against dis- 




JOE SOKONIK, CRIPPLED IN BODY, BUT A COURAGEOUS CHRIS- 
TIAN AT HEART, IS TEACHER AND JUDGE IN HIS ALASKAN 

VILLAGE 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 115 

ease, and their spiritual battles against ignorance, 
superstition, and fear? 

Among the Mexicans. All that we have said 
about the physical, social, and spiritual needs of 
immigrants applies to the Mexicans, but our rela- 
tions with Mexico are such a live issue just now 
that it is worth while to consider certain aspects 
of the Mexican problem separately from the immi- 
gration problem as a whole. There are nearly 
1,750,000 Mexicans in this country. Their funda- 
mental need, and ours too, is mutual understand- 
ing. 

Our newspapers have reported so many crimes 
along the Mexican border that most of us have 
gained the impression that Mexico is peopled with 
bandits, and that the great majority of the Mexi- 
cans who have come to this country are of the 
bandit class. Nothing could be further from the 
truth. They are a priest-ridden people. In their 
own country they are kept in ignorance and dire 
poverty. To free them from their bondage of 
fear and of ignorance and of poverty is the unfin- 
ished task which confronts the younger genera- 
tion about to take hold of this problem. That 
emancipation can never be brought about by blood- 
shed or by force of any kind. Understanding 
and friendship are the Christian methods, and 
they are methods which as yet are almost wholly 
untried. 



116 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

The writer spent several weeks along the Mexi- 
can border last year. He went there with the 
average American's prejudice against Mexicans; 
but after meeting hundreds of Mexicans face to 
face, talking with them, observing their homes, 
their work, and their churches, he became con- 
vinced that the missionaries along the Mexican 
border are right in their conviction that 10 per 
cent of the Mexican trouble is Mexico's fault, 
and 10 per cent is America's fault, and the rest 
is due to mutual misunderstanding. The great 
majority of the Mexicans of this country are living 
honest, law-abiding lives. The writer has never 
seen more lively Christian Endeavor societies 
anywhere or a more reverent spirit in worship, 
or a more eager interest in Sunday-schools than 
these Mexicans displayed. To look into the faces 
of the Mexican children is to love them and want 
to help them. And to attend their Sunday-schools, 
which are filled with vigor and enthusiasm, is to 
have a firm faith in their possibilities as future 
Americans. 

Although the Mexican problem will probably 
have to be solved by the people living along the 
border, it is a national problem, and if it is to be 
solved correctly, it will need the combined faith 
and good- will of Christians throughout the length 
and breadth of the land. The flow of Mexican 
immigration has gone as far north as Canada and 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 117 

as far east as Pennsylvania. American indus- 
tries in the West are coming more and more to 
depend upon Mexico for their manual labor sup- 
ply. In much of the Southwest cotton is today 
picked not by the Negroes, but by the Mexicans ; 
and Mexicans pick all the grapes, walnuts, citrus 
fruit, and cantaloupes. They work the weary 
miles of railroad on the section gangs and swing 
the pick and shovel in the copper mines of Ari- 
zona. In Idaho, Utah, western Washington, Iowa, 
Illinois, and Kansas, as well as in the border states 
of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, 
Mexican colonies are multiplying. 

At present about the only agencies that are 
trying to bring about a better understanding be- 
tween the Americans and the Mexicans in these 
new colonies are the missions of the Protestant 
churches. But the field force and material equip- 
ment of these missions are wholly inadequate for 
the task. Most of them were established several 
years ago when the Mexican population was less 
than a third of what it is now. To enlarge this 
field force, to provide it with proper equipment, 
and then to back it up with our good- will and faith 
is the task before us. 

The migrant laborers. About 1,500,000 men in 
this country are constantly on the move from one 
seasonal occupation to the next. One season a 
migrant laborer may be in Texas helping with the 



118 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

harvest, the next season in Oklahoma or Kansas 
in the oil fields, and the next season in the lumber- 
camps of Oregon or Washington. Who are these 
men and what sort of life do they live ? They are 
a motley crowd. Many of them are immigrants. 
Others are sons of unsuccessful farmers, or ten- 
ants who have failed to make good. Not a few 
of them come from the cities, and some are skilled 
mechanics or clerks who have degenerated through 
incompetency or vice. A normal family life is im- 
possible to them. Of 40,000 seasonal workers 
studied in California, only 10 per cent were mar- 
ried. As a whole these men are unorganized, un- 
skilled, uncared for. Their wages are usually 
high while the season lasts, and because of their 
unattached lives they are the target of bootleg- 
gers, immoral women, and all the low elements of 
human society. Their need for Christian fellow- 
ship and leadership is great, but as yet the Church 
is only experimenting in her efforts to find the 
best way to give it. 

In the East, women and children, largely for- 
eign, are sucked into this nomadic existence. 
Over 22,000 each year are required to harvest and 
can our fruits and vegetables. In the early spring 
we find whole families taking up their abode in 
labor camps, where often no thought has been 
given to proper sanitation or housing facilities. 
Nor is this for one season only; when this work is 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 119 

finished in the late fall, hundreds migrate to the 
oyster canneries on Chesapeake Bay or the Gulf 
Coast and so are shut out for the whole cycle of 
the year from school, church, and community life. 

These conditions were brought to the attention 
of the Council of Women for Home Missions and 
in the summer of 1920 work was organized in four 
centers. Day nurseries, kindergartens, day and 
Sunday-schools, supervised play, hot noon-lunches, 
practical lessons in sewing, weaving, cooking, and 
general housekeeping, — all were carried on by the 
workers under the Council. The canners cooper- 
ated, supplying the building in each center and 
light and water. The community organized a com- 
mittee of women who stood back of the workers. 
They supplied some equipment, food for the hot 
lunches, and clothes for the babies and children. 
In many cases the ministers helped with the Sun- 
day services. Following this first season's work 
many new requests came from cannery managers 
to have this work established in their places. 

The experiment showed that such work could be 
done and done effectively. The privilege of lead- 
ership in this challenging field has been given to 
the churches. Are we going to let the shortness 
of our vision or the difficulty of the task hinder 
us in making this contribution to our needy fellow- 
men? 



120 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

Our greatest race problem. An English editor 
observed at a time of great unrest in Ireland that 
America might better mind her own business and 
settle the Negro situation before trying to dictate 
to Great Britain about Ireland. Was he right? 
One has only to go back hastily over colonial his- 
tory and the first sixty or seventy years of "these 
United States of America ' ' to perceive how stead- 
ily disturbing to the public mind was this matter 
of the Negro. With each new state or territory 
acquired, the intensely significant question came 
to be, "Shall it be slave territory ?" And fam- 
ilies, friendships, denominations, and political 
parties were broken up by the ensuing divergences 
of opinion. The Emancipation Act that followed 
the Civil War was but the beginning of fresh 
trouble. We plunged the Negroes into new and 
difficult conditions of living, into unaccustomed 
civic responsibility for which we had in no way 
prepared them. We laughed at their clumsy ef- 
forts to use their liberty, at their sense ,of self- 
importance. We let the racial peculiarities, which 
had not greatly mattered when the relationship 
was one of master and slave, emerge into irritat- 
ing importance, now that the relationship was 
one of citizenship, and we discriminated against 
them in the courts and in occupations. 

Negro progress. In spite of these handicaps, 
they have come a long way as a race. Former 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 121 

Ambassador Bryce is quoted as having said that, 
during the first thirty years of his freedom, the 
American Negro made greater progress than was 
ever made by the Anglo-Saxon race in an equal 
period. They have reduced their illiteracy from 
90 per cent in 1865 to less than 30 per cent in 
1920. Business enterprises owned and controlled 
by Negroes have increased in the same period 
from 21,000 to 45,000. Negro laborers are mov- 
ing gradually from unskilled to semi-skilled and 
skilled occupations. Sixty years ago only 20,000 
of them operated farms; today nearly a million 
operate farms. Sixty years ago none of them 
owned a farm; today more than a quarter of a 
million own their own farms. Sixty years ago only 
12,000 owned homes; today half a million are 
home owners. Then only 100,000 Negro children 
were receiving public school training; now nearly 
two million are enrolled in public schools, and 
30,000 Negroes are teachers. From their midst 
men of eminence have emerged, Frederick Doug- 
lass, Booker T. Washington, Major Moton, Paul 
Laurence Dunbar, and others. Towards this 
progress the churches and the government have 
done somewhat; for example, we note Hampton 
Institute, ten well-equipped Negro hospitals, and 
a variety of industrial and other schools and insti- 
tutions under various auspices. But too much 
ignorance, ill-health, and injustice still remain. 



122 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

The Negro migrations to the North. What has 
been done is small compared with what remains to 
be done toward giving this race education, justice, 
and a fair chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit 
of happiness. Of late years a new situation has 
arisen. Vast numbers of Negroes have been leav- 
ing the farms and cities of the South and swarm- 
ing to the great industrial centers of the North. 
Here they are packed together in tenements, often 
located in the disreputable districts and away 
from the better influence of churches, decent 
homes, and normal conditions of health and living. 
They become the prey of the exploiter on one hand 
and the agitator on the other. They are counted 
"easy marks" for corrupt politicians and for 
bootleggers. Many of them lose their religion and 
with it the progress they have made since 1860. 

The growing menace. Throughout nearly every 
new book and article on the Negro question these 
days throbs a genuine fear. It is the fear of im- 
pending catastrophe. That fear has grown with 
alarming rapidity since 1914. It is the fear of 
real warfare between whites and blacks. If we do 
not grant the Negro his rights, it is quite possible 
that within ten or a dozen years he may claim 
them by force. 

A growing race-consciousness. Consider the 
following facts selected from those presented to 
the Federal Council of Churches in December, 




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OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 123 

1920, by the Government Director of Negro Eco- 
nomics, Dr. George E. Haynes : 

A growing race-consciousness on the part of the 
Negro is to be noted, a sense of worth, a feeling 
of racial solidarity. An International Negro Con- 
vention, for example, was held in New York last 
summer, with representatives from South Amer- 
ica and Africa as well as from the West Indies 
and the States. They elected officials for all Negro 
countries and drafted a program of sixty-six 
articles. How has this developing sense of im- 
portance come about? Injustices shared have 
bound them together. Gains in intelligence and 
wealth have raised their estimates of themselves. 
But the greatest cause is unquestionably the 
World War. The 500,000 Negroes who, during the 
war, migrated from the South to northern indus- 
trial centers did so in part as a result of govern- 
ment propaganda. They also received high wages. 
Manifestly they were ' * somebody. ' ' 200,000 other 
Negroes went as soldiers to Prance, and an equal 
number to camps in this country. They received 
the same pay and wore the same uniform as white 
soldiers. They met with unexpected social recog- 
nition. In the service they became acquainted 
with each other also. They likewise became more 
intelligently informed concerning other countries 
where the Negro has been unfairly treated. The 
religious doctrines of the white man did not seem 



124 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

to be in operation anywhere. Justice and mercy 
were not in practise. Were not the so-called 
Christian nations themselves fighting to settle 
their differences? Might not force be the way 
for the Negro to get justice ? 

Compelling reasons for solving the problem. 
We have not yet discharged the obligation toward 
the Negro that comes to us out of the past. More- 
over, unless we can now persuade him that we are 
willing to let him develop his personality peace- 
fully, he may resort to force in order to wrest the 
privilege from us. That would injure him in his 
spirit more than it could harm us. But it would 
set the bloody stamp of failure upon our attempts 
to work out any sort of Christian cooperation in 
our greatest race problem. 

The failure would be all the more tragic because 
of the Negro's record for congeniality and his 
known religious nature. The more than five hun- 
dred Negro songs that have come up from slavery 
breathe all the range of emotion, — love, joy, hope, 
fear, triumph, — but not one of them breathes a 
note of malice, hatred, or revenge. 

Still another reason for helping the Negro 
exists. All the governments that have colonies 
in Africa need light on the color question. They 
are studying America to learn what discoveries 
she has made that may be of benefit to them also. 
If we can demonstrate that we are working along 



OTHER UNFINISHED TASKS 125 

right lines here, they will probably make similar 
experiments in their Negro territories. We have 
extraordinary opportunity to be of influence and 
of service. Are we equal to the occasion? We 
shall not be if we drift or remain indifferent. We 
need to put into operation at once an earnest and 
intelligent program that embodies the ideal of 
Christian cooperation. It is really the duty of the 
nation to do this, and that means the younger gen- 
eration, for the memories of the Civil War are 
still too fresh in the minds of the generation that 
is passing. 

Let us stop here and add up some of these fig- 
ures. 37,000,000 foreigners (16,000,000 foreign- 
born plus their 21,000,000 children), 11,000,000 
Negroes, 1,750,000 Mexicans, 3,000,000 Southern 
Mountaineers, 1,500,000 migrant laborers, 334,- 
000 Indians, 54,000 Alaskans; these total 54,638,- 
000 human beings. Deduct the 4,638,000 as pos- 
sible duplication in the Immigrant, Mexican, and 
Migrant Labor groups. There still remain about 
50,000,000 men, women, and children, — nearly 
half the population of this country. This 
is what we call "the other half." They are 
the men and women and children who have not 
had your opportunities to develop the divine pos- 
sibilities God has given to all his children. They 
have not had your opportunities for education and 



126 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

justice and progress. To give them their chance, 
as we have had ours, is the unfinished task before 
us. Does it seem too great a burden? 

Kate Douglas Wiggin once met a little girl on a 
city street carrying a little boy almost as big as 
herself. "Isn't he too heavy?" asked Mrs. Wig- 
gin, ' ' Heavy ? ' ' answered the little girl. ' ' No, he 
isn't heavy — he's my brother." 



CHAPTEE SIX 

The Life of Sekvice 

You want to choose the life of service, or you 
would not have read thus far. You want to do 
what you can to lead human progress — to make 
your life count for something in helping those less 
fortunate than yourself. You want to do your 
share in making America Christian for the 
friendly service of the world. The question is, 
how? 

Some principles of leadership. The true leaders 
of human progress are those who are blazing 
trails toward something better. They are the 
missionaries of politics, the missionaries of edu- 
cation, the missionaries of science, the mission- 
aries of religion. The true leaders of human 
progress are not the noise-makers. They are not 
the negative men ^ho simply howl down the 
present state of society or the present govern- 
ment or the present science or the present system 
of morals or education or religion. 

Let us be quite clear on this point before we 
go further. The real leaders of progress are not 
destroyers; they are builders. They do not 
separate themselves from their brothers ; they live 

127 



128 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

among them, love them, lead them up. You will 
not lead the crowd in a better way by simply 
saying c c no ' * or ' ■ don 't. ' ' Nor will you help much 
by withdrawing into a shell of self-righteousness. 
You will not become a leader by styling yourself 
one or making a lot of noise. 

You will be a leader as you are fearless where 
others fear ; as you see clearly what others grope 
for ; as you proclaim in confidence what others 
feel but cannot express. You will be a Christian 
leader only as you connect yourself with the in- 
dwelling God and try constructively to do his will. 

Some trail blazers: a leader in medicine. That 
doesn't necessarily mean that men will write 
"Rev." before your name. We are not speak- 
ing here of professional service, but rather of 
leadership in lay service. Some of the most 
effective leaders in the Kingdom of God have 
been lay men and women as consecrated in their 
lives and work as any minister. Let us look at 
a few such leaders and see how they are leading. 
Some forty-five years ago Edward Livingston 
Trudeau was a young medical student in New 
York. His brother died of tuberculosis, and he 
himself became a victim of the disease. Prac- 
tically nothing was known about the disease in 
those days ; if one had it, he must be sure to keep 
the windows closed. Young Trudeau finished his 
medical studies, but shortly afterward his health 



THE LIFE OF SERVICE 129 

failed, and he was taken to Saranac Lake to die. 
But he would not die. For forty years he lived 
on at Saranac Lake. He studied tuberculosis as 
no other man had done. He found out how the 
disease comes and how it may be treated. Slowly 
and by infinite struggle he built around himself 
the Saranac Sanitarium which has brought new 
life to thousands upon thousands of men and 
women afflicted with tuberculosis. The last dozen 
years of his life he was so afflicted that he could 
sleep only an hour at a time, and yet he worked 
away in his little laboratory without thought of 
giving up. When fire swept the laboratory away, 
he built a new one and went on "fighting with an 
easy smile the death that so long besieged him to 
the end, that others after him, afflicted similarly, 
may not die." A modern writer went to inter- 
view this man a little while before his death and 
came away with this tribute upon his pen, "The 
best of our tricky and trivial achievements in set- 
ting words together dwindle in my mind to indis- 
tinction beside the labors and spirit of this man." 
Yes, surely, a leader of human progress. 

In Flea Hops, Alabama. Down in Alabama 
there is a collection of shacks that goes by the 
name of Flea Hops. A slip of a girl started a 
school there a few years ago. When last heard 
of, she had a building made of brush and a roof 
made of the stars, and pupils from seven years to 



130 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

seventy. She was teaching them the simplest 
principles of education, how to read and write and 
solve simple problems in arithmetic. And day by 
day she was leading them gently to a higher level 
of thought and feeling. 

In the Southern Mountains. In the mountains 
of Tennessee, there is a little mission school 
among the mountaineers where a girl is working 
twelve months a year on a modest salary. She is 
a college girl, but she is content to do without the 
niceties and manners of college. She is giving her 
life to the thirty or forty children and their 
parents who live there, separated from the rest 
of the world by a wall of rock and by a more im- 
penetrable wall of ignorance. In her dress and 
manners she adapts herself to the level of the 
people, that they may gradually rise to hers. 

Among the Negroes. In Hampton, Virginia, 
there is a school where a corps of able teachers 
is year by year trying to instil into the colored 
race high ideals and practical ability. They are 
doing it. They are turning out colored men and 
women who know not only how to use their hands 
and their heads, but who save their money, farm 
well, and live sober, honest, useful lives. 

On a desert. Out on the Wyoming desert, in 
a frontier mission, there is a preacher who is 
homely and awkward and ignorant, but he is so 
much in earnest that, to hear him preach, the 




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THE LIFE OF SERVICE 131 

cattle men and settlers ride ten miles to his 
services. He is not only earnest but vitalizing, 
and they will tell you the community is a far 
better place to live in than it was before that 
parson came. 

A leader among Bohemian farmers. And here 
is the story of a young minister who mixed his 
religion with pigs and cows and better farming 
and patriotism and the things of this world gen- 
erally. Eight years ago Eev. H. E. Beseda, a 
young minister, American born of Bohemian 
parents, left a theological seminary and went to 
live in a little Bohemian colony, known as "Six 
Mile" because it was situated six miles from 
Port Lavaca, Texas. There were but fifty families 
in the colony; he had no church building and no 
organization, but there were a schoolhouse and a 
crude community hall that furnished shelter for 
his meetings. Precious little shelter was needed, 
however, for the Bohemians, embittered by their 
church experience in the old country, were ex- 
ceedingly skeptical about any form of organized 
religion. 

Three difficult and discouraging years followed, 
during which the minister was learning his com- 
munity and its needs. He became convinced that 
the first need was for better farming, so that his 
people might build up a stronger and more pros- 
perous community and have more profits to spend 



132 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

on churches, schools, roads, and other institutions 
that develop the mental and spiritual life. 

Since there was no one else to take the leader- 
ship toward better farming, he decided to take it 
himself, and out of his meager salary he paid his 
way through a summer short course in agricul- 
ture at the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical 
College. 

He purchased a thoroughbred Poland China 
sow and persuaded his Boy Scouts to purchase 
the little pigs at ten dollars each with guarantee 
that, if the pigs did not more than pay for them- 
selves, he would refund the ten dollars. Today 
the Bohemians of Six Mile specialize in thorough- 
bred Poland China pigs. 

He organized a night school of thirty men for 
the study of the English language and American 
history, and for debating social and civic ques- 
tions. Out of this night school evolved a men's 
club of sixty-six members. He persuaded the 
men's club to purchase a thoroughbred bull in 
order that the grade of the stock of the com- 
munity might be improved; today the Bohemian 
farmers of Six Mile specialize in thoroughbred 
cattle as well as pigs. 

Every year, since his own first summer course, 
he has been returning to the Agricultural College 
and taking with him five or six farmers in order 
that they may have the inspiration and the train- 



THE LIFE OF SERVICE 133 

xng necessary for continually building up their 
community. 

When a county agent was secured, he found Six 
Mile a community ready for his gospel and eager 
to give its cooperation. A poultry club and a 
corn club were started, and later a cotton grader 
was employed at a salary of $1,500 to spend six 
months each year grading up the cotton crop of 
the neighborhood by the most advanced methods 
of seed selection, cultivation, care, and marketing. 

Now, after eight years, Six Mile is a successful 
and prosperous community. The young minister 
has advanced the spiritual side of his work hand 
in hand with the social side, he has ninety-one 
Bohemian members in his church, and he is plan- 
ning the organization of similar work to reach 
and serve the 200,000 Bohemian farmers in Texas, 
to help them become Christian citizens of America. 

In a country church. Robert Adams, a young 
graduate of an Eastern university, athlete, and 
all-around man, surprised his fellow-students 
when he told them he was going to enter the min- 
istry. He gave them another surprise a few 
years later when, instead of taking a city pas- 
torate to which he was called, he went to a coun- 
try village in Maine, one of those little country 
places where folks were always quarreling. For 
five hard years Adams worked and pleaded for a 
broader religion and for a religion applied to the 



134 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

practical problems of daily life, — the school, the 
farms, the roads, the playgrounds. But as far as 
he could see, he made no headway. Then sud- 
denly he died, — his life apparently a failure. His 
classmates heard of his death, heard that the 
people among whom he had lived and worked had 
not appreciated Adams ' work enough to put up a 
monument over his grave ; so they took up a col- 
lection among themselves and sent one of their 
men up to that Maine village to erect a monument. 
When the man arrived, he sought out a leading 
elder of the church and told him of his errand. 

"So you've come to buy Adams a monument, 
have you?" asked the elder. 

"Yes," replied Adams' classmate* 

"How much of a monument do you expect to 
build?" 

"Oh, not very large, but larger than you have 
built for him, I guess." 

"Are you sure of that? Come with me." 

And so the elder took him out to a new build- 
ing on the church property. Over the door of the 
new building were the words, "Robert Adams 
Memorial House." It was a community club. 

"You see," said the elder, "after he died we 
got thinking about what he had said and how he 
had wanted us to put our religion into practise, 
to live like brothers and it seemed that we could 



THE LIFE OF SERVICE 135 

best honor his memory by a house like this instead 
of a marble tombstone.' ' 

When the inspection of the house was over, the 
village elder said, "Now what do you think of 
our monument V 9 

The classmate decided that this monument was 
better than marble, and the funds he had brought 
he left as a donation to the community club. 

Partners with God. These are but a few exam- 
ples of the men and women who are the real 
leaders of progress in America. The vast ma- 
jority of them are unknown, but each, faithful 
in his small corner, is doing the will of the 
Father. They are partners with God, working as 
He works, in the individual and often immediately 
unsuccessful way; but when the centuries have 
had their say, if the past be our guide, the march 
of human progress will be found following the 
trail these missionaries have blazed. 

"But," you say, "I am only one person — surely 
God does not expect much from just one person." 
Surely, He does. Do you not know the power for 
good of one person? 

With half a lung. A few years ago a preacher 
with only half a lung went from New York City 
to a small farming community. His name was 
John S. Burton. He was assigned to three tiny 
churches on a circuit. His salary was microscopic. 



136 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

It was not sufficient to support his wife and three 
children in even the simplest sort of country- 
minister style. It had to be helped out by gifts 
of potatoes and beans, turnips and corn, and 
whatever else the neighbors saw fit to bring in. 
He went into the community with the expectation 
of dying there, and that before long. But as he 
got acquainted with his parishes, he found work 
that needed to be done before he died. Here were 
farmers thirty miles from New York City, each 
living to himself and each competing with his 
neighbor farmers in marketing his products. The 
young men were leaving the farms as fast as they 
could go. Life in the country was too slow, too 
dull, and too unpromising. The only place to 
have any fun at all seemed to be the small city 
four miles away. 

Now the preacher thought that these things 
ought not to be. Farmers were as good as other 
people, and life in the country, he thought, could 
be made just as attractive as life in the city. Yes, 
even more so. The one problem was to get the 
farmers to work together. And that is about the 
hardest problem under the sun. Farmers don't 
want to work together. All their life in the open 
on their farms teaches them only how to work 
independently. The farmer's boast is his inde- 
pendence. He's proud of what he does by him- 
self, not what he does together with his neighbors. 



THE LIFE OF SERVICE 137 

The preacher set about to bring these farmers 
together — to make them learn to work and play 
together. 

He needed a horse and buggy. He had only 
$50 in cash, and he knew he couldn't get much of 
a horse for $50. But he announced that he wanted 
to buy a horse and was willing to pay $50. Im- 
mediately all the horse traders of the country 
began to come to him. They brought the lame, the 
halt, and the blind — a most miscellaneous collec- 
tion of horse-flesh. Now the preacher knew noth- 
ing about horses and could not tell a good one 
from a bad one. But somehow he had the courage 
to reject all these. Then one day the preacher 
wandered into a large farm. He called to ask the 
owner of the farm to come to church. The owner 
was not a church-going man and he said after- 
wards that he had a strong inclination to turn the 
hose upon the preacher. But he made a great 
show of being courteous. "It's a hard job you 
have here," he said by way of starting the con- 
versation. " Yes, " said the preacher, ' ' but it isn 't 
a hopeless job. If I can get one or two young men 
turned around and started on a life of decency 
and good citizenship, I'll call my work a success." 
That appealed to the farmer, for he had a son 
of his own. When the preacher left the house that 
afternoon, the farmer called up a few of hig 
neighbors and got them to subscribe enough to 



138 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

buy a good horse and a buggy for the parson. 
And then the parson went to work in earnest. 
He forgot all about dying. A year after he had 
come there, a community club was flourishing 
among the farmers. It had 300 members. They 
gave a country fair. There were exhibitions of 
farming and garden products, there were a plow- 
ing contest and a flower show, there were exhibi- 
tions of cooking and of industrial work, and there 
were athletic contests winding up with a ball 
game. The fair was held at one of the farms, and 
the whole neighborhood was there. The stores in 
the small city four miles away closed their doors 
on Saturday from ten o'clock in the morning to 
five in the afternoon in order that their employees 
might go out into the country to attend it. After 
the fair, one of the farmers in the community, a 
Eoman Catholic, offered to give one of the houses 
on his farm rent-free as a club house for the com- 
munity club. The club has a dozen or more com- 
mittees, an Educational Committee, a Better 
Farming Committee, a Lecture Course Commit- 
tee, etc. Some of the neighborhood's business 
men who live in the city in the winter have be- 
come so interested in it that one night a week they 
come out from the city especially to attend the 
meetings of this club. This preacher is on no 
committee, — he is not chairman or secretary or 
treasurer. He is just a sort of two-legged prayer- 



THE LIFE OF SERVICE 139 

meeting going about the community filling every- 
body full of the right spirit. 

A poor widow's power. In New England, a 
few years ago, a widow with four children moved 
from the city out to an old ramshackle building on 
a little farm. The family had seen better days, 
but when the husband had died he left but little, 
and that little the widow had invested in this 
farm. She and her children arrived at the house 
at twilight. The weeds were growing tall around 
the place. In the yard there was a litter of broken 
cart wheels, old barrels, boxes, and rubbish of all 
sorts. Inside the house, dirt lay on the floors and 
cobwebs hung from the ceilings. Nobody met 
them. Nobody greeted them. They had neither 
light nor food nor fuel that first night. The 
widow and her children set to work and after a 
few days had put the place to rights inside and 
out. But it was hard work and work that she and 
her children were not used to. Not a neighbor 
came near to lend a hand. When the widow had 
finished her house-cleaning she made a resolution 
that no one else should ever come into that com- 
munity, while she lived there, without a welcome. 
And every family of newcomers since that time 
has found that the widow and her children have 
been to the house before them. Strangers have 
found their yards cleaned, a lamp upon the table, 
and a couple of pies or a loaf of bread. Now it 



140 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

didn't cost much, and it was all the widow could 
contribute to that community, but how it must 
have cheered the hearts of strangers. The King- 
dom of God came nearer because of that widow 
and her children. Who has less power for good 
than they? 

A mother defies a mob. In a certain coal camp 
in Wyoming, there were 5,000 people and no 
church, no Y. M. C. A., no religious institution of 
any kind. But there were a hundred-odd saloons. 
Persons going to that camp made the trip on a 
freight train, because no passenger trains went 
there. In that camp was a Mrs. Smith who was 
trying to run a Sunday-school. She was a spare, 
hard-working little woman, nearly always busy 
with a broom trying to get the alkali dust out of 
her shanty. She had two little sons and one 
daughter. She wanted them to grow up decent 
and clean, but she saw little chance for them in 
that rum-soaked camp. She wanted them to have 
religious instruction, and she tried to teach them 
as best she knew. But she soon found that it 
wouldn't do much good to try to teach her chil- 
dren alone in her little home. She must teach 
their playmates too. So she started a Sunday- 
school in the little shanty. She soon worked up 
a membership of forty. Then one day she held 
a Sunday-school picnic. She invited the parents 
of the children, and they came in droves. They 



THE LIFE OF SERVICE 141 

brought with them two hundred bottles of beer 
and whisky, prepared for an all day's revel. She 
captured the liquor and broke the first bottle on 
the rocks and threatened to break the next on the 
head of the first man who tried to touch the stuff 
that day. Who can measure that woman's power 
for good in that coal camp? And who can meas- 
ure your power for good in your community — you 
who have more training and more advantages 
than she? 

The power of one person. Yes, you have the 
power. God is always talking to you as though 
you were possessed of infinite capacity for doing 
good. 

"But even if I do have the power, I have no 
materials to work with; the folks around me are 
indifferent. " Think again. It is quite possible 
that God has blessed the materials as well as 
you. He seems to have done it that way in the 
past. 

John Bunyan, "miserable tinker,' ' vile-mouthed 
and devil-may-care boy, looked like pretty poor 
material, but someone put faith in him, was kind 
to him, and the memory of that kindness and the 
power of that faith worked like leaven in his 
heart until he became the John Bunyan who wrote 
Pilgrim's Progress and led thousands of men 
and wom^n to make the great pilgrimage. 

The immigrant boy, your neighbor, whom you 



142 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

now regard as a problem, whose habits may be 
unclean and repulsive, seems poor material, but 
who knows what usefulness he may develop if you 
but give him a helping hand? 

The military officers who participated in the 
Crimean War probably regarded a slip of a girl 
as pretty poor material for war work. But one 
day when the war was over, a number of officers 
met and in the course of their discussion the ques- 
tion arose, "Whose name will be remembered 
longest after this war?" Each agreed to write 
upon a slip of paper the name of the person whose 
memory would be most enduring, and every one 
of them wrote the same name — Florence Night- 
ingale. 

A girl's possibilities. The war against disease 
is a continuous one, and somehow the world has 
come to look upon a woman r s part in that war as 
more vital than a man's part. Her power to bring 
comfort, to soften a pillow or cool a fever, to pre- 
pare a palatable dish or to say the word of cheer, 
is God-given. 

Service to the sick begins in simple friend- 
liness and continues to the highest point of 
professional and expert care, claiming the best 
gifts of highly trained men and women. Within a 
quarter of a mile of you now there must be those 
whose suffering would be more endurable if you 
would bring to them a touch of friendship. 



THE LIFE OF SERVICE 143 

A girl's part in the emancipation of slaves. Do 
you remember how it was that the slaves were 
freed in England without bloodshed? Priscilla 
Gourney had a great deal to do with it. She 
lived in a Christian home. Her sister married 
a rather unpromising young man who went into 
politics. Priseilla brought to bear upon him 
gently and persuasively her ideal of freedom for 
the slaves. She besought him to take up the cause 
and to fight for it. He was persuaded. He took 
up the fight and won out. The slaves were free, 
and the whole world gave credit to Fowell Buxton, 
but Heaven probably gave goodly credit to Pris- 
cilla Gourney, his sister-in-law. 

Martha Berry and her neighbors. About 
eighteen years ago Martha Berry, a girl of re- 
finement and rare courage, became interested in 
the less-favored boys and girls of the mountains 
near her home in northwestern Georgia. She told 
them Bible stories on Sunday afternoons in an 
old log cabin. The children brought others to 
hear the "Sunday Lady." The more she saw of 
the needs of these children and their hunger for 
knowledge, the more her heart went out to them. 
Her Sunday-school became a day school. Her day 
school developed into a great industrial training 
institution. It grew out of one building into 
twenty buildings. Her first handful of pupils be- 
came a hundred, then two hundred. Today the 



144 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

boys and girls who have been trained in the Berry- 
Schools would make a small army. In the lives 
of those young people Martha Berry has invested 
her all. William Gr. McAdoo visited this school, 
and when he came away he said, "I would rather 
have been the founder of this school than to have 
built the Hudson Kiver Tunnels." 

A long look. Let us look back over the thought 
trails of this book. America stands at the cross- 
roads of self-interest and service. America is you 
and the thousands of other young men and women 
now in our schools and colleges, for you are the 
leaders of tomorrow. As you lead, America will 
follow, and you want to play square with America 
and with tomorrow. 

We have considered the paths of self-interest 
and of service, their starting points and their 
goals, and we have found the path of service more 
worth while. We have seen, too, some of the ob- 
stacles: the way of the crowd, the struggle of 
traditionalism against progress, the misunder- 
standings and sacrifices. We have faced some of 
the great needs that call for service, the needs at 
our own doors and those national needs that seem 
to line up all the way from New York to the Mex- 
ican border, and from Alaska to Porto Rico. We 
have had some few glimpses of the great Captain, 
and of those who in the years since have heard his 
call and followed him along the path of service. 



THE LIFE OF SERVICE 145 

We have seen the power of one person — the 
miracle of what God can do with one imperfect 
human being consecrated to his service. 

The challenge is before us — at our hand — now. 
Wherever there is a human spirit struggling for 
freedom, for health, for knowledge, for the devel- 
opment of its divine possibilities, there is the need 
for our help, there is our first field for service. It 
is in our own town and very likely in our own 
neighborhood. Our first contribution is our 
friendship, honest and sincere. Our first leader- 
ship is the contagion of our spirits, hopeful and 
active. But our service cannot end with our own 
communities. The more we work in our own 
neighborhood, the more we gain in understanding 
and the more we lift our eyes to the world outside. 
Many of the local obstacles to be removed are 
national and international in their reach, and our 
efforts must unite with the efforts of those in 
other communities. The more we work at our own 
local tasks, the more sympathy we have for others 
who are fighting the same fight and the more we 
want to help them. And so before we know it, 
we find that we are marching shoulder to shoulder 
with others who have chosen the same way — with 
the missionaries among the immigrants, the In- 
dians, the Alaskans, the Mexicans, the Latin 
Americans, the Southern Mountaineers, and all 
the rest. We are all one, marching shoulder to 



146 PLAYING SQUARE WITH TOMORROW 

shoulder along God's way. It is the happiest way 
of human life. 

Comrades in service. Ralph Waldo Emerson 
knew the path of service for he chose it in his 
youth and clung to it in spite of much misunder- 
standing and persecution. He knew the pitfalls, 
the tempting by-paths of least resistance ; he knew 
the sharp rocks, the bitterness of the opposition, 
and the loneliness of the struggle; but he knew 
also its deeper joys, the peace of mind and heart 
and the rare comradeship of the way. Looking 
back over the road after many years of march, 
he sent these words of encouragement to those of 
us who are still near the beginning : 

Be of good cheer, brave spirit ; steadfastly 

Serve that low whisper thou hast served ; for know, 

God hath a select family of sons 

Now scattered wide thro' earth, and each alone, 

"Who are thy spiritual kindred, and each one 

By constant service to that inward law, 

Is weaving the sublime proportions 

Of a true monarch's soul. Beauty and strength, 

The riches of a spotless memory, 

The eloquence of truth, the wisdom got 

By searching of a clear and loving eye 

That seeth as God seeth. These are their gifts, 

And Time, Vho keeps God's word, brings on the 

day 
To seal the marriage of these minds with thine, 
Thine everlasting lovers. Ye shall be 
The salt of all the elements, world of the world. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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